Overview of a streams flow
You can design a new streams flow on an easy-to-use canvas.
- Deprecation
- The Streams Flows service is deprecated and will be removed from IBM Cloud Pak for Data in an upcoming release.
The streams flow is deployed to the industry-leading Streams service that offers best-in-class analytics and optimization. You can curate, analyze, and act on massive amounts of changing data in real time. Regardless of whether the data is structured or unstructured, you can leverage data at scale to drive real-time analytics for up-to-the-minute business decisions.
For more information on choosing the right tool for your data and use case, see Choosing a tool.
Watch this video to learn about a streams flow.
This video provides a visual method as an alternative to following the written steps in this documentation.
Data is growing fast in volume, variety, and complexity. Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data! Traditional analytic solutions are not able to fully unlock the potential value of that data.
In a streams flow, you can access and analyze massive amounts of changing data as it is created. Regardless of whether the data is structured or unstructured, you can leverage data at scale to drive real-time analytics for up-to-the-minute business decisions.
A streams flow is easy to design and deploy. You select the data source and target, and we set up the streams flow for you. Example flows are available that you can tweak to meet your specific analytic needs. You can use sample data to test your streams flow design before you push it to production with real data.
Let’s get started with some basic information.
What’s a streams flow?
A streams flow is a continuous flow of massive volumes of moving data that real-time analytics can be applied to.
In IBM Watson Studio, a streams flow is a type of asset that is in a project. By working in a project, data scientists can collaborate to analyze the data, and then solve a common business need.
Components of a streams flow
A basic streams flow consists of a source and a target. Your streams flow can receive streaming data from different source types. Alternatively, you can connect to your own external sources or use our sample data. Your streams flow can send streaming data to different target types.
A streams flow consists of operators. Every node on the streams flow canvas is an operator. The different types of operators include sources, targets, data processing, alerts, and real-time analytics.
All stream flows begin with source operators and end with target operators. Source operators ingest data, so they have only output ports, located on the right side of the operator.
Data is streamed into target operators, so they have only input ports, located on the left side of the operator. All other operators have both input and output ports. Multiple data streams can flow to an input port. Likewise, multiple data streams can flow from an output port.
You can quickly get up and running by using an example streams flow that we supply. An example streams flow is a complete end-to-end data flow with sample data that is ready for immediate use. No customization is needed.
You can also download a streams flow, and then import it into a different project.