Moksh Bhardwaj, Author at DEVOPS DONE RIGHT

Nifi and Zookeeper Cluster Setup with Terraform

Recently while trying to set up Apache Nifi in cluster mode manually, I faced the challenge of performing same tasks on all nodes manually. In addition configuring the right cluster configurations was not easy. In my last blog here, I have covered the advantages of having nifi cluster over standalone and the manual steps to configure a Nifi cluster with external zookeeper.
In this article, I will show you how you can set up a three-node Zookeeper and Nifi cluster with terraform which will minimize the steps we have to perform with manual setup.

Apache NiFi is an open-source data integration and automation tool that enables the automation of data flow between different systems. NiFi provides a user-friendly interface to design, control, and manage the flow of data between various sources and destinations. The tool is particularly useful in handling data from different sources, applying transformations, and routing it to different systems in real-time.

Advantage of Using Terraform for Nifi

Terraform allows you to define your NiFi cluster infrastructure as code, making it easily versioned, shareable, and easy to understand. This ensures that your infrastructure is consistent across different environments. This helps in maintaining consistency and reducing the chances of configuration drift. As your NiFi cluster requirements evolve, Terraform makes it simple to scale your infrastructure up or down by adjusting the configuration.

Setting Up Apache Nifi Cluster with External Zookeeper

Nifi Cluster Setup with External Zookeeper

Why use the Nifi cluster over the standalone?

Performance: Clusters can handle higher throughput and provide better performance than standalone instances due to load distribution.
Fault Tolerance: Clusters provide high availability and fault tolerance such as if one node fails, the other nodes take over the processing.
Scalability: Clusters allow for scalability by adding more nodes, whereas standalone instances have limitations in scaling.

Securing Nifi Cluster with TLS Toolkit

Apache NiFi is an easy-to-use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. As data flows between different systems it’s a good practice to ensure the integrity of the data being processed. Securing a NiFi cluster is essential for various reasons, primarily to protect sensitive data, ensure system integrity, and prevent unauthorized access. Apache NiFi provides a TLS toolkit using which we can self-sign Certificate Authority (CA) and easily issue and sign certificates in the format expected by NiFi.

What is the need to secure the Nifi cluster?

Data Protection: NiFi clusters often handle sensitive and critical data. Securing the cluster prevents unauthorized access, tampering, or theft of this data.
Preventing Unauthorized Access: Unauthorized access to the NiFi cluster can result in data breaches or system compromise. Implementing authentication and access control measures helps prevent unauthorized users from accessing the cluster.
Encryption: Securing the data transmissions within the NiFi cluster through encryption helps safeguard data as it moves across the network, reducing the risk of interception or eavesdropping by unauthorized entities.

AWS Elastic Network Interface

Networking plays an important role in connecting the components of infrastructure. AWS networking feature works with various types of workloads and provides security, availability, and manageability. Now as most of the IT companies are working on cloud environments for cost reduction, high availability, data security, we are getting some interesting networking features as services. We can manage these quite easily too. Among those services is Elastic Network Interface (ENI) which we get by default when we create an EC2 instance on AWS and can be seen while the instance is being created. It may surprise many of us that the security group is attached to this elastic network interface.