BYOP: Custom Processor Development with Apache NiFi

Apache NiFi, a robust, scalable, and secure tool for data flow management, ships with over 212 processors to ingest, route, manipulate, and exfil data from a variety of sources and consumers. But many users turn to NiFi to meet unusual requirements — from proprietary protocol parsing, to running inside connected cars, to offloading massive hardware metrics from oil rigs in the most remote environments. Rather than posting a community request for custom development or offloading unusual demands to unnecessary external systems, there’s an answer in NiFi. Learn how NiFi allows you to quickly prototype custom processors in the scripting language of your choice against live production data without affecting your existing flows. Easily translate prototypes to full-fledged processors to optimize performance and leverage the full provenance reporting infrastructure. Discover how the framework provides conventions to streamline your development and minimize common boilerplate code, and the robust testing framework to make testing easy, and dare we say, fun.

Expected prior knowledge / intended audience: developers and data flow managers should have passing knowledge of Apache NiFi as a platform for routing, transforming, and delivering data through systems (a brief overview will be provided). The intended audience will have experience with programming in Groovy, Ruby, Jython, ECMAScript/Javascript, or Lua.

Takeaways: Attendees will gain an understanding in writing custom processors for Apache NiFi, including the component lifecycle, unit and integration testing, quick prototyping using a scripting language of their choice, and the artifact publishing and deployment process.