We are very excited to announce the release of Apache Samza 0.14.1
Samza has been powering real-time applications in production across several large companies (including LinkedIn, Netflix, Uber, Slack, Redfin, TripAdvisor, etc) for years now. Samza provides leading support for large-scale stateful stream processing with:

  • First class support for local state (with RocksDB store). This allows a stateful application to scale up to 1.1 Million events/sec on a single machine with SSD.
  • Support for incremental checkpointing of state instead of full snapshots. This enables Samza to scale to applications with very large state.
  • A fully pluggable model for input sources (e.g. Kafka, Kinesis, DynamoDB streams etc.) and output systems (HDFS, Kafka, ElastiCache etc.).
  • A fully asynchronous programming model that makes parallelizing remote calls efficient and effortless.
  • High level API for expressing complex stream processing pipelines in a few lines of code.
  • Flexible deployment model for running the the applications in any hosting environment and with cluster managers other than YARN.
  • Features like canaries, upgrades and rollbacks that support extremely large deployments with minimal downtime.

Enhancements, Upgrades and Bug Fixes

This is a minor release which contains improvements over multiple areas. In particular:

  • SQL
  • SAMZA-1681 Add support for handling older record schema versions in AvroRelConverter
  • SAMZA-1671 Add insert into table support
  • SAMZA-1651 Implement GROUP BY SQL operator
  • Standalone
  • SAMZA-1689 Add validations before state transitions in ZkBarrierForVersionUpgrade
  • SAMZA-1686 Set finite operation timeout when creating zkClient
  • SAMZA-1667 Skip storing configuration as a part of JobModel in zookeeper data nodes
  • SAMZA-1647 Fix NPE in JobModelExpired event handler
  • Eventhub
  • SAMZA-1688 Use per partition eventhubs client
  • SAMZA-1676 Miscellaneous fix and improvement for eventhubs system
  • SAMZA-1656 EventHubSystemAdmin does not fetch metadata for valid streams
  • Host-affinity
  • SAMZA-1687 Prioritize preferred host requests over ANY-HOST requests
  • SAMZA-1649 Improve host-aware allocation to account for strict locality

In addition, Samza is also upgraded to support Kafka version 0.11 in this release.

Overall, 51 JIRAs were resolved in this release.
A source download of the 0.14.1 release is available here. The release JARs are also available in Apache’s Maven repository. See Samza’s download page for details and Samza’s feature preview for new features. We requires JDK version newer than 1.8.0_111 when running 0.14.1 release for users who are using Scala 2.12.

Community Developments

In March 21th, we held the meetup for Stream Processing with Apache Kafka & Apache Samza, which has the following presentations for Samza:

In industry, Samza got new adopters, including Ntent and Movico.

Contribute

It’s a great time to get involved. You can start by reviewing the tutorials, signing up for the mailing list, and grabbing some newbie JIRAs.
I’d like to close by thanking everyone who’s been involved in the project. It’s been a great experience to be involved in this community, and I look forward to its continued growth.