The Core domain model includes the concept of a stream that is a composition of spring-cloud-stream apps in a linear pipeline from a source to a sink, optionally including processor apps in between. The domain also includes the concept of a task, which may be any process that does not run indefinitely, including Spring Batch jobs.

The App Registry maintains the set of available apps, and their mappings to a URI. For example, if relying on Maven coordinates, the URI would be of the format: maven://<groupId>:<artifactId>:<version>

The Data Flow Server Core provides the REST API and UI to be used in combination with an implementation of the Deployer SPI when creating a Data Flow Server for a given deployment environment.

The Shell connects to the Data Flow Server’s REST API and supports a DSL that simplifies the process of defining a stream and managing its lifecycle.

Several Data Flow Server implementations exist, covering a range of runtime environments:

As mentioned above, the Spring Cloud Data Flow Server implementations all rely upon corresponding implementations of the Spring Cloud Deployer SPI, which provides the abstraction layer for deploying the apps of a given stream or task. The following are links to the deployer SPI projects that correspond to the Data Flow Servers listed above: