Apache Beam's Python SDK does not play nicely with the pkg_resources.require API.
More generally, it fails due to badly defined requirement versions between grpcio and protobuf.
This makes using apache-beam in any python project which is consumed as a library itself incapable of using the SDK.
To see the failure, use the code in this gist and run:
virtualenv apache-beam-requirements && source apache-beam-requirements/bin/activate
pip install -e .
python runner.py