Apache Beam
Apache Beam is an open-source, unified programming model for defining and executing data processing pipelines, both batch and streaming. It provides a set of SDKs in languages like Java, Python, and Go, along with runners that execute pipelines on various processing backends such as Apache Flink, Apache Spark, and Google Cloud Dataflow. This abstraction allows developers to write data processing logic once and run it on multiple execution engines without code changes.
Developers should learn Apache Beam when building complex, scalable data processing applications that need to handle both batch and streaming data with consistency across different execution environments. It is particularly useful in scenarios requiring portability across cloud and on-premises systems, such as ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines, real-time analytics, and event-driven architectures, as it simplifies deployment and reduces vendor lock-in.