What is Flume?
Flume is an open source distributed service for efficiently collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of log data. It is designed to be flexible, scalable, and reliable for handling massive quantities of data.
Some key features of Flume include:
- Simple and flexible architecture based on streaming data flows
- Highly available through failover and recovery
- Robust and reliable with transactional flows
- Horizontally scalable to handle increasing data volumes
- Pluggable design supports custom sources, sinks, channels, interceptors, etc
- Integrates well with other big data tools like HDFS, HBase, Solr, Kafka, etc
Flume is well suited for gathering large amounts of web/application logs or social media data like tweets in real time. The lightweight agent architecture allows Flume to be installed on many web servers with minimal overhead. Data flows through memory or disk-based channels and sinks to final storage in Hadoop or other systems. Additional agents can be added anywhere to fan out and replicate flows.
Instagram, Grum, Desktop for Instagram, Pixelfed, Later, Stim Social, InstaGhost, MealMe, Timeagram, Steller, Postedo are some alternatives to Flume.