Prompt: What is a pipeline development lifecycle in Apache Beam?

Response: The Apache Beam pipeline development lifecycle is an iterative process that usually involves the following steps:

• Design your pipeline.
• Develop your pipeline code.
• Test your pipeline.
• Deploy your pipeline.

During each iteration, you might need to go back and forth between the different steps to refine your pipeline code and to fix bugs.

To design a pipeline, you need answers to the following questions:

• Where is the data stored?
• What does the data look like?
• What do you want to do with your data?
• What does your output data look like, and where should it go?

Beam documentation has more information about pipeline design and about common pipeline patterns.

An Apache Beam program expresses a data processing pipeline, from start to finish. To construct a pipeline using the classes in the Apache Beam SDKs, your program needs to perform the following steps:

• Create a Pipeline object.
• Use a Read or Create transform to create one or more PCollection objects for your pipeline data.
• Apply transforms to each PCollection.
• Write or otherwise output the final, transformed PCollection objects.
• Run the pipeline.

The Apache Beam documentation has more information about developing and executing pipelines.

Testing pipelines is a particularly important step in developing an effective data processing solution. The indirect nature of the Beam model, in which your user code constructs a pipeline graph to be executed remotely, can make debugging failed runs difficult. For more information about pipeline testing strategies, see Test Your Pipeline.

Choosing a runner is a crucial step in deploying your pipeline. The runner you choose determines where and how your pipeline executes. For more information about pipeline deployment, see Container environments.