A primitive transform is a PTransform that has been chosen to have no default implementation in terms of other PTransforms. A primitive transform therefore must be implemented directly by a pipeline runner in terms of pipeline-runner-specific concepts. An initial list of primitive PTransforms were defined in [2] and has since been updated in [3].
As part of the portability effort, libraries that are intended to be shared across multiple runners are being developed to support their migration to a portable execution model. One of these is responsible for fusing multiple primitive PTransforms together into a pipeline runner specific concept. This library made the choice that a primitive PTransform is a PTransform that doesn't contain any other PTransforms. Unfortunately, while Ryan was attempting to enable testing of validates runner tests for Flink using the new portability libraries, he ran into an issue where the Apache Beam Java SDK allows for a person to construct a PTransform that has zero sub PTransforms and also isn't one of the defined Apache Beam primitives. In this case the PTransform was trivial as it was not applying any additional transforms to input PCollection and just returning it. This caused an issue within the portability libraries since they couldn't handle this structure. To solve this issue, I had proposed that we modify the portability library that does fusion to use a whitelist of primitives preventing the issue from happening. This solved the problem but caused an issue for Thomas as he was relying on this behaviour of PTransforms with zero sub transforms being primitives. Thomas has a use-case where he wants to expose the internal Flink Kafka and Kinesis connectors and to build Apache Beam pipelines that use the Flink native sources/sinks. I'll call these "native" PTransforms, since they aren't part of the Apache Beam model and are runner specific. This brings up two topics: A) What should we do with these "empty" PTransforms? B) What should we do with "native" PTransforms? The typical flow of a pipeline representation for a portable pipeline is: language specific representation -> proto representation -> job service -> shared libraries that simplify/replace the proto representation with a simplified version (e.g. fusion) -> runner specific conversion to native runner concepts (e.g. GBK -> runner implementation of GBK) ------------------ A) What should we do with these "empty" PTransforms? To give a little more detail, these transforms typically can happen if people have conditional logic such as loops that would perform an expansion but do nothing if the condition is immediately unsatisfied. So allowing for PTransforms that are empty is useful when building a pipeline. What should we do: A1) Stick with the whitelist of primitive PTransforms. A2) When converting the pipeline from language specific representation into the proto representation, drop any "empty" PTransforms. This means that the pipeline representation that is sent to the runner doesn't contain the offending type of PTransform and the shared libraries wouldn't have to change. A3) Handle the "empty" PTransform case within all of the shared libraries. I like doing both A1 and A2. A1 since it helps simplify the shared libraries since we know the whole list of primitives we need to understand and A2 because it removes noise within the pipeline shape from its representation. ------------------ B) What should we do with "native" PTransforms? Some approaches that we could take as a community: B1) Prevent the usage of "native" PTransforms within Apache Beam since they hurt portability of pipelines across runners. This can be done by specifically using whitelists of allowed primitive PTransforms in the shared libraries and explicitly not allowing for shared libraries to have extension points customizing this. B2) We embrace that closed systems internal to companies will want to use their own extensions and enable support for "native" PTransforms but actively discourage "native" PTransforms in the open ecosystem. B3) We embrace and allow for "native" PTransforms in the open ecosystem. "native" PTransforms are useful in closed systems since they allow companies to solve certain scenarios which would not be practical to expose the Apache Beam community. It does take more work for the community to support these types of extensions. To my knowledge, Google is likely to want to do something similar to handle internal use cases similar to what Thomas is trying to do. I'm for either B1 or B2 since the risk of embracing and allowing for "native" PTransforms in the open ecosystem is likely to fragment the project and also is counter to what portability is really about. 1: https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/6328 2: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bao-5B6uBuf-kwH1meenAuXXS0c9cBQ1B2J59I3FiyI/edit#heading=h.tt55lhd3k6by 3: https://github.com/apache/beam/blob/6df2ef3ec9c835097e79b4441ce47ff09a458894/model/pipeline/src/main/proto/beam_runner_api.proto#L180
