Apache NiFi Reviews

We are a research institution and use NiFi for its easy Java extensibility, built-in provenance capturing, and graphical web interface.

We are replacing a custom built Java data ingestion system that over time had become difficult to maintain and was brittle.

NiFi allows us to organize our ingestion as the directed graphs and provides a useful GUI, that can be used to configure the system and monitor data flows.

NiFi’s provenance capturing is also a big plus, as our legacy system did not do this sufficiently.

Most of our data is binary and we frequently must write our own processors. Also, there is no support for the stateful operations that require information from other data flows or look-up tables.

I have used this solution for more than one years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

It is an open-source software, but there is an active and rapidly growing contributor and user base.

We previously used custom code and switched to simplify maintenance and improve our functionality.

The initial setup was very straightforward. NiFi is very easy to install and get running.

It’s free!

We looked at some proprietary solutions and also, evaluated StreamSets. The proprietary solutions were expensive and often didn’t suit our use cases. StreamSets didn’t have the same level of adoption.

Think about your data flows as the directed graphs between low-level processing modules, so you can re-use as much of the path as possible for different data streams. Don’t create entirely separate flows for new data sources, i.e., if you can avoid it.

The web based UI is phenomenal in allowing an easier usage of configurations than Apache Flume. We will see Hortonworks begin to slowly move away from Flume and bring Apache NiFi into their platform. NiFi allows the user to track the data flow from source to destination with a visual representation and statistics at every connection and process along the way.

The installation and configuration of a simple process that moves a file from a local server, copies it into HDFS, and indexes the file in Solr. It took all of 30 minutes at most and each process is started, stopped, deleted with a few clicks.

NiFi has allowed my organization to greatly increase our visualization of data flows. This has subsequently increase our understanding of the entire systematic process from data receiving to endpoint visualization.

Some

I've used it for two months.

No issues were encountered with deployment, just be sure to have the most recent version of Java installed and configured.

The timeline of usage hasn't allowed for a thorough view of the product in order to truly assess any possible stability issues. Scalability was not an issue with our deployment.

Scalability was not an issue with our deployment.

NiFi is open source through Apache, customer service is at a minimum, but their website offers answers to most questions my team encountered.

NiFi is open source through Apache, technical support is at a minimum, but their website offers answers to most questions my team encountered.

We were previously using Apache Flume for our data ingestion. Flume was a solid product, but it just did not offer the visual representations and full start-to-end processing that our organization was looking for.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. The install files are quite handy as it allows the user to change which port the web-based UI is run off of so as to not interfere with any other processes that are using the default ports.

We implemented through an in-house team.

Being that this product is open-source, our ROI has been infinite, but since our implementation, our Big Data team have double our clients.

Free setup-cost. Day-to-day is simply the cost to maintain the server it is running on.

Phenomenal product. It is in its early stages, and through further development this product has the potential to be a powerhouse in the Big Data sector of the tech industry.