Services, Service Pools and Environments

To perform these responsibilities, a platform operator works with three important abstractions in Streaming Analytics Manager:

• Service is an entity that an application developer works with to build stream apps. Examples of services could be a Storm cluster that the stream app will be deployed to, a Kafka cluster that is used by the stream app to create a streams, or a HBase cluster that the stream app writes to.

• Service Pool is a set of services associated with an Ambari managed cluster

• Environment is a named entity that represents a set of services chosen from different service pools. A stream app is assigned to an environment and the app can only use the services associated with an environment.

The following diagram illustrates these constructs:

The Service, Service Pool, and Environment abstractions provide the following benefits:

1. Simplicity and ease of use: An application developer can use the Service abstraction without needing to focus on configuration details. For example, to deploy a stream app to a Storm cluster, the developer does not need to consider how to configure the Storm cluster (Nimbus host, ports, and so on). Instead, the developer simply selects the Storm service from the environment associated with the app. The service abstract out all the details/complexities.

2. Ease of propagating a stream app between environments: With Service as an abstraction, it is easy for the stream operator or application developer to move a stream app from one environment to another. They simply export the stream app and import it into a different environment.