Docker is a popular container runtime. There are Docker images for Apache Flink available on Docker Hub which can be used to deploy a session cluster. The Flink repository also contains tooling to create container images to deploy a job cluster.
A Flink session cluster can be used to run multiple jobs. Each job needs to be submitted to the cluster after it has been deployed.
The Flink Docker repository is hosted on Docker Hub and serves images of Flink version 1.2.1 and later.
Images for each supported combination of Hadoop and Scala are available, and tag aliases are provided for convenience.
Beginning with Flink 1.5, image tags that omit a Hadoop version (e.g.
-hadoop28
) correspond to Hadoop-free releases of Flink that do not include a
bundled Hadoop distribution.
For example, the following aliases can be used: (1.5.y
indicates the latest
release of Flink 1.5)
flink:latest
→ flink:<latest-flink>-scala_<latest-scala>
flink:1.5
→ flink:1.5.y-scala_2.11
flink:1.5-hadoop27
→ flink:1.5.y-hadoop27-scala_2.11
Note: The Docker images are provided as a community project by individuals on a best-effort basis. They are not official releases by the Apache Flink PMC.
A Flink job cluster is a dedicated cluster which runs a single job. The job is part of the image and, thus, there is no extra job submission needed.
The Flink job cluster image needs to contain the user code jars of the job for which the cluster is started.
Therefore, one needs to build a dedicated container image for every job.
The flink-container
module contains a build.sh
script which can be used to create such an image.
Please see the instructions for more details.
As described in the plugins documentation page: in order to use plugins they must be copied to the correct location in the Flink installation for them to work.
When running Flink from one of the provided Docker images by default no plugins have been activated. The simplest way to enable plugins is to modify the provided official Flink docker images by adding an additional layer. This does however assume you have a docker registry available where you can push images to and that is accessible by your cluster.
As an example assume you want to enable the S3 plugins in your installation.
Create a Dockerfile with a content something like this:
Then build and push that image to your registry
Now you can reference this image in your cluster deployment and then these plugins are available for use.
Docker Compose is a convenient way to run a group of Docker containers locally.
Example config files for a session cluster and a job cluster are available on GitHub.
Launch a cluster in the foreground
docker-compose up
Launch a cluster in the background
docker-compose up -d
Scale the cluster up or down to N TaskManagers
docker-compose scale taskmanager=<N>
Kill the cluster
docker-compose kill
When the cluster is running, you can visit the web UI at http://localhost:8081. You can also use the web UI to submit a job to a session cluster.
To submit a job to a session cluster via the command line, you must copy the JAR to the JobManager container and submit the job from there.
For example:
$ JOBMANAGER_CONTAINER=$(docker ps --filter name=jobmanager --format={{.ID}})
$ docker cp path/to/jar "$JOBMANAGER_CONTAINER":/job.jar
$ docker exec -t -i "$JOBMANAGER_CONTAINER" flink run /job.jar