title: Does it make sense to use Google DataFlow/Apache Beam to parallelize image processing or crawling tasks?
body: <p>I am considering Google DataFlow as an option for running a pipeline that involves steps like:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Downloading images from the web;</li>
  <li>Processing images.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I like that DataFlow manages the lifetime of VMs required to complete the job, so I don't need to start or stop them myself, but all examples I came across use it for data mining kind of tasks. I wonder if it is a viable option for other batch tasks like image processing and crawling.</p>