Hi,
What do you think about collecting some of the feedback from the
community at Beam Summit last week? Here's what I've come across:
* The Kubernetes / Docker Story
Multiple users reported that they would like a Beam-Kubernetes story.
What is the best way to deploy Beam with Kubernetes? Will there be
built-in support?
Especially with regards to the portability, there are some unsolved
problems, e.g. how to start Beam containerized and bootstrap the SDK
Harness container from within a container? For local testing with the
JobServer we support that via mounting the Docker socket, but this will
be too fragile in production scenarios. Now that we have process-based
execution, we could just use that inside the main container.
Deployment is a very important topic for users and we should try to
reduce complexity as much as possible.
* External SDKs / Scio
Users have asked why Scio is not part of the main repository. Generally,
I don't think that has to be the case, same for the Runners which are
not part of the main repo. However, it does raise the question, what
will be the future model for maintaining SDKs/IOs/Runners? How do we
ensure easy development and a consistent quality of internal/external
components?
* Documenting Timers & State
These two have excellent blog posts but are not part of the official
documentation. Since they are part of the model, it would be good to
eventually update the docs.
* Better Debuggability of pipelines
Even a simple WordCount in Beam leads to a quite complex Flink execution
graph (due to the the involved I/O logic). How can we make pipelines
easier to understand? Will we provide a way to visualize the
architecture of high-level Beam pipelines? If so, do we provide a way to
gain insight into how it is mapped to the Runner execution model? Users
would like to have more insight.
* Current Roadmap
This was asked in the context of portability. By the end of the year we
should have at least the FlinkRunner in a ready state, with the rest
following up. There are a lot of others threads in Beam. The newsletter
is a great way to keep up with the project development.
Looking forward to any other points you might have.
Best,
Max