Expose: Experimental Performance Evaluation Of Stream Processing Engines Made Easy

Experimental performance evaluation of stream processing engines (SPE) can be a great challenge. Aiming to make fair comparisons of different SPEs raises this bar even higher. One important reason for this challenge is the fact that these systems often use concepts that require expert knowledge for each SPE. To address this issue, we present Expose, a distributed performance evaluation framework for SPEs that enables a user through a declarative approach to specify experiments and conduct them on multiple SPEs in a fair way and with low effort. Experimenters with few technical skills can define and execute distributed experiments that can easily be replicated. We demonstrate Expose by defining a set of experiments based on the existing NEXMark benchmark and conduct a performance evaluation of Flink, Beam with the Flink runner, Siddhi, T-Rex, and Esper, on powerful and resource-constrained hardware.