Business | November 27, 2023
Earlier this month, hundreds of Apache Flink enthusiasts gathered at the annual Flink Forward conference at the Hyatt Regency Lake near Seattle. Cloudera proudly participated as a sponsor and supporter of the open source community. The conference highlighted the advancement and adoption of Apache Flink as a cutting-edge streaming and stream processing technology.
Key Takeaways from the Flink Forward Conference:
1. The Flink community is thriving: With 1.4 million downloads, 21,000 GitHub stars, and 1,600 code contributions, Flink has become the industry standard for stream processing. Cloudera views Flink as a technology here to stay.
2. Majority of Flink users are in early stages of maturity: Many teams have migrated from legacy ETL tools and other stream processing technologies to Flink. There is a need to democratize stream processing for larger user bases, which is why Cloudera has developed SQL Stream Builder.
3. Simplified deployment architectures are expected to accelerate adoption: Organizations are moving their Flink deployments to Kubernetes to optimize performance and resource utilization. Cloudera is embracing Kubernetes in their Data in Motion stack to provide more portable and scalable Flink PaaS offerings.
4. Growing realization that Kafka is not enough: Many are looking to offload Kafka and are turning to Flink for this purpose. Cloudera offers a complete set of capabilities for streaming data with Kafka, Flink, NiFi, and Iceberg, providing organizations with real-time insights.
5. Stream Processing and Lakehouse capabilities need each other: The unveiling of Apache Paimon supports the trend of integrating stream processing with data at rest. While still early, there is potential for Flink plus Iceberg to be the compute plus storage solution for streaming data.
In conclusion, Flink Forward was an insightful conference and Cloudera looks forward to continuing their support of the open source community. To learn more about how Cloudera is bringing Flink to the enterprise, join their webinar on December 14.