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Apache NiFi is a powerful data integration tool that provides a user-friendly interface for designing and managing data flows between systems. It supports a wide variety of data sources and destinations, including databases, message queues, and cloud services.
Confluent’s data streaming platform provides a fully managed, cloud-native service available in any on-prem, multi-cloud, or serverless environment. Stream, integrate, govern, and secure data in real time.
NiFi provides a graphical user interface for creating, monitoring, and managing data flow, making it accessible to users with limited programming experience. Apache NiFi offers a powerful expression language that allows users to dynamically modify the flow of data within the system. The NiFi expression language enables users to define dynamic properties and perform transformations on data in real time.
Apache Kafka, Apache Airflow, and Apache NiFi are all open-source tools that can be used for data processing and streaming. However, they have different strengths and weaknesses.
In general, Apache Kafka is a good choice for applications that require real-time processing of large amounts of data. Apache Airflow is a good choice for applications that require complex data pipelines to be scheduled and managed. Apache NiFi is a good choice for applications that require data to be extracted, transformed, and loaded from a variety of sources.
Here is a table that summarizes the key differences between the three tools:
| Feature | Apache Kafka | Apache Airflow | Apache NiFi |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data processing | Real-time processing | Batch processing | Real-time processing |
| Data size | Large | Large | Small to large |
| Data sources | Various | Various | Various |
| Use cases | Event streaming, real-time analytics, data integration | ETL, data warehousing, machine learning | Data ingestion, data cleansing, data enrichment |
Apache NiFi is a powerful, scalable, and flexible dataflow management system. It can be used to automate the movement and transformation of data between disparate systems. NiFi is a popular choice for a variety of use cases, including:
NiFi is a horizontally scalable system, meaning that you can add more nodes as needed to increase its capacity. This makes it a good choice for large-scale data processing. For example, if you need to process data from a large number of sources, you can add more NiFi nodes to handle the load.
NiFi achieves scalability through the use of a master-slave architecture. The master node is responsible for coordinating the flow of data, while the slave nodes are responsible for processing data. This architecture allows NiFi to scale to meet the needs of even the most demanding data processing applications.
Here are the top common use cases for Apache NiFi:
Apache NiFi is a powerful tool, but it can be extremely complex to manage and deploy.
NiFi and Confluent are somewhat orthogonal to each other as NiFi is focused primarily on specifying data flows in a graphical UI while Confluent is focused on near real-time streaming data at scale. There is a bidirectional integration between Confluent / Apache Kafka and Apache NiFi wherein Apache NiFi can consume messages from Kafka and produce messages to Kafka in a straightforward manner via drag-drop and component configuration in the NiFi interface. Apache NiFi materials will note that ETL functions can be offloaded into Apache NiFi but this isn’t always appropriate for Confluent use cases. ksqlDB, Kafka Streams, and Apache Flink also meet data processing requirements, do so at scale, in a streaming manner and within Confluent’s offering.