Stackable Operator for Apache NiFi

Get started with Apache NiFi and the Stackable operator by following the Getting started guide. It guides you through the installation process and connect to the NiFi web interface. Afterward, have a look at the Usage guide to learn how to configure your NiFi instance to your needs or run some demos to learn more about using NiFi with other components.

The operator manages the NifiCluster custom resource. NiFi only has a single process that it needs to run, so the NifiCluster has only a single role: node. This role can be divided in multiple role groups.

For every role group the operator creates a ConfigMap and StatefulSet which can have multiple replicas (Pods). Every role group is accessible through it’s own Service, and there is a Service for the whole Cluster.

Apache NiFi depends on Apache ZooKeeper which you can run in Kubernetes with the Stackable Operator for Apache ZooKeeper.

NiFi is often a good choice as a first step in a data pipeline when it comes to fetching the data in various formats from various sources. The data-lakehouse-iceberg-trino-spark demo uses NiFi to fetch six different datasets in various formats. The data is then ingested into a Kafka topic. Apache Kafka is also part of the Stackable platform.

The nifi-kafka-druid-earthquake-data and nifi-kafka-druid-water-level-data demo use NiFi in the same way, both demos showcase downloading data from web APIs and ingesting it into Kafka.

The Stackable operator for Apache NiFi currently supports the NiFi versions listed below. To use a specific NiFi version in your NifiCluster, you have to specify an image — this is explained in the Product image selection documentation. The operator also supports running images from a custom registry or running entirely customized images; both of these cases are explained under Product image selection as well.

For details on how to upgrade your NiFi version, refer to Updating NiFi.