Apex is an enterprise grade native YARN big data-in-motion platform that unifies stream processing as well as batch processing. Apex processes big data in-motion in a highly scalable, highly performant, fault tolerant, stateful, secure, distributed, and an easily operable way. It provides a simple API that enables users to write or re-use generic Java code, thereby lowering the expertise needed to write big data applications.

Functional and operational specifications are separated. Apex is designed in a way to enable users to write their own code (aka user defined functions) as is and leave all operability to the platform. The API is very simple and is designed to allow users to drop in their code as is. The platform mainly deals with operability and treats functional code as a black box. Operability includes fault tolerance, scalability, security, ease of use, metrics api, webservices, etc. In other words there is no separation of UDF (user defined functions), as all functional code is UDF. This frees users to focus on functional development, and lets platform provide operability support. The same code runs as is with different operability attributes. The data-in-motion architecture of Apex unifies stream as well as batch processing in a single platform. Since Apex is a native YARN application, it leverages all the components of YARN without duplication. Apex was developed with YARN in mind and has no overlapping components/functionality with YARN.

The platform comes with Malhar, a library of operators that implement common business logic functions needed by customers who want to quickly develop applications. These operators provide access to HDFS, S3, NFS, FTP, and other file systems; Kafka, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, JMS, and other message systems; MySql, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, HBase, CouchDB and other databases along with JDBC connectors. The Malhar library also includes a host of other common business logic patterns that help users to significantly reduce the time it takes to go into production. Ease of integration with all other big data technologies is one of the primary missions of Malhar.