Apache Beam is an open source unified programming model to define and execute data processing pipelines, including ETL, batch and stream (continuous) processing.

[3] Apache Beam[3] is one implementation of the Dataflow model paper.

[4] The Dataflow model is based on previous work on distributed processing abstractions at Google, in particular on FlumeJava[5] and Millwheel.

[6][7] Google released an open SDK implementation of the Dataflow model in 2014 and an environment to execute Dataflows locally (non-distributed) as well as in the Google Cloud Platform service.

Apache Beam makes minor releases every 6 weeks.