Building streaming applications can be a difficult task — often, just figuring out how to get started can be overwhelming. In this article, we'll cover how and when to use NiFi with Pulsar and Flink and how to get started. Apache NiFi, Apache Pulsar, and Apache Flink are robust, powerful open-source platforms that enable running any size application at any scale. This enables us to take our quickly developed prototype and deploy it as an unbreakable clustered application ready for internet-scale production workloads of any size.
Using a drag-and-drop tool can help reduce that difficulty and allow us to get the data flowing. By utilizing Apache NiFi, we can quickly go from ideation to data streaming as live events in our Pulsar topics. Once we have a stream, building applications via SQL becomes a much more straightforward premise. The ability to rapidly prototype, iterate, test, and repeat are critical in modern cloud applications.