EasyFlinkCEP: Big Event Data Analytics for Everyone

FlinkCEP is the Complex Event Processing (CEP) API of the Flink Big Data platform. The high expressive power of the language of FlinkCEP comes at the cost of cumbersome parameterization of the queried patterns, acting as a barrier for FlinkCEP's adoption. Moreover, properly configuring a FlinkCEP program to run over a computer cluster requires advanced skills on modern hardware administration which non-expert programmers do not possess. In this work (i) we build a novel, logical CEP operator that receives CEP pattern queries in the form of extended regular expressions and seamlessly re-writes them to FlinkCEP programs, (ii) we build a CEP Optimizer that automatically decides good job configurations for these FlinkCEP programs. We also present an experimental evaluation which demonstrates the significant benefits of our approach.