Flink application structure
You must understand the parts of application structure to build and develop a Flink streaming application. To create and run the Flink application, you need to create the application logic using the DataStream API.
- Creating the execution environment
- Loading data to a source
- Transforming the initial data
- Writing the transformed data to a sink
- Triggering the execution of the program
StreamExecutionEnvironment
The getExecutionEnvironment() static call guarantees that the
pipeline always uses the correct environment based on the location it is executed
on. When running from the IDE, a local execution environment, and when running from
the client for cluster submission, it returns the YARN execution environment. The
rest of the main class defines the application sources, processing flow and the
sinks followed by the execute() call. The execute call triggers the
actual execution of the pipeline either locally or on the cluster. The
StreamExecutionEnvironment class is needed to configure
important job parameters for maintaining the behavior of the application and to
create the DataStream.
