Benthos is a high performance message streaming service, able to connect various sources and sinks and perform arbitrary actions, transformations and filters on payloads. It is easy to deploy and monitor, and ready to drop into your pipeline either as a static binary or a docker image.
A Benthos stream consists of four layers: inputs, optional
buffer, processor workers and outputs.
Inputs and outputs can be combined in a range of broker patterns. It is possible
to run multiple isolated streams within a single Benthos instance using
--streams
mode, and perform CRUD operations on the running
streams via REST endpoints.
Delivery Guarantees
Benthos is crash resilient by default. When connecting to at-least-once sources and sinks without a buffer it guarantees at-least-once delivery without needing to persist messages during transit.
When running a Benthos stream with a buffer there are various options for choosing a level of resiliency that meets your needs.
Supported Sources & Sinks
- Amazon (S3, SQS)
- Elasticsearch (output only)
- File
- HTTP(S)
- Kafka
- MQTT
- Nanomsg
- NATS
- NATS Streaming
- NSQ
- RabbitMQ (AMQP 0.91)
- Redis
- Stdin/Stdout
- Websocket
- ZMQ4
Documentation
Documentation for Benthos components, concepts and recommendations can be found in the docs directory.
For some applied examples of Benthos such as streaming and deduplicating the Twitter firehose to Kafka check out the cookbook section.
Run
benthos -c ./config.yaml
Or, with docker:
# Send HTTP /POST data to Kafka:
docker run --rm \
-e "INPUT_TYPE=http_server" \
-e "OUTPUT_TYPE=kafka" \
-e "OUTPUT_KAFKA_ADDRESSES=kafka-server:9092" \
-e "OUTPUT_KAFKA_TOPIC=benthos_topic" \
-p 4195:4195 \
jeffail/benthos
# Using your own config file:
docker run --rm -v /path/to/your/config.yaml:/benthos.yaml jeffail/benthos
Metrics
Benthos exposes lots of metrics either to Statsd, Prometheus or for debugging purposes an HTTP endpoint that returns a JSON formatted object.
Configuration
The configuration file for a Benthos stream is made up of four main sections; input, buffer, pipeline, output. If we were to pipe stdin directly to Kafka it would look like this:
input:
type: stdin
buffer:
type: none
pipeline:
threads: 1
processors: []
output:
type: kafka
kafka:
addresses:
- localhost:9092
topic: benthos_stream
There are also sections for setting logging, metrics and HTTP server options.
Benthos provides lots of tools for making configuration discovery and debugging easy. You can read about them here.
You can also find runnable example configs demonstrating each input, output, buffer and processor option here.
Environment Variables
It is possible to select fields inside a configuration file to be set via environment variables. The docker image, for example, is built with a config file where all common fields can be set this way.
Install
Build with Go:
make deps
make
Or, pull the docker image:
docker pull jeffail/benthos
Or, grab a binary for your OS from here.
Docker Builds
There's a multi-stage Dockerfile
for creating a Benthos docker image which
results in a minimal image from scratch. You can build it with:
make docker
Then use the image:
docker run --rm \
-v /path/to/your/benthos.yaml:/config.yaml \
-v /tmp/data:/data \
-p 4195:4195 \
benthos -c /config.yaml
There are a few examples here that show you some ways of
setting up Benthos containers using docker-compose
.
ZMQ4 Support
Benthos supports ZMQ4 for both data input and output. To add this you need to install libzmq4 and use the compile time flag when building Benthos:
make TAGS=ZMQ4