Tech Insights from Flink Forward 2018

Early September 2018, 8 EURA NOVA engineers travelled to Berlin to attend the Flink Forward Conference, dedicated to Apache Flink users and stream processing communities.

They came back with a lot to say about the hot topics in stream processing and the presented use cases! In this article, they will give you their opinion about data Artisans’ main announcement, the intakes of their favourite talks, and what they thought makes Flink Forward different from other conferences.

First keynote announcement:

During the keynote speech, data Artisans announced that they now bring ACID transactions directly on streaming data with data Artisans Streaming Ledger.

Charles Bonneau, our software architect, says: “This feature allows ACID transactions between multiple operators’ event-processing operations and internal states. This means that streaming applications can now update multiple states in one transaction. For example, an application that transfers money from one bank account to another can finally be implemented using Flink with strong consistency guarantees. Both bank accounts will have their balance updated at the same time as if there was a master data-management state”.

For Sabri Skhiri, our R&D director, this opens the doors to a brand new range of applications, especially in data-driven real-time services but also in streaming data management. He explains: “They are pushing forward the concept of streaming. Now, you could imagine a master data-management state that can be updated by operational streaming applications in real time. This will allow even more complex and advanced use cases of stream processing!”.

Favourite talks:

In 2 days, each Euranovian attended about 18 talks and use case presentations, with speakers from tech giants such as IBM, Netflix, Alibaba, and Uber as well as speakers from smaller companies.

Charles explains: “The conclusions are reassuring: most of them face the same issues that we see at our clients’ and our solutions are all valuable. They include a stream-first data architecture, a stream-first data pipeline product, and Flink developers skills. Even though a number of companies are at the very edge of the technology and their issues do not yet require continuous flows of a considerable amount of events, we are ready”.

For our R&D Director Sabri Skhiri, the keynote speech from Lightbend was one of the most interesting ones. He explains: “Viktor Klang, Lightbend deputy CTO, talked about the convergence between microservices and stream processing. At EURA NOVA, we have been advocating for this convergence for more than a year in our architecture practice. The idea is simple: asynchronous microservices can be designed as stream processing stages. This is fantastic because it makes modern stateful stream processing frameworks the perfect target for implementing reactive microservices. With stateful deployment, exactly once semantics, high availability and ACID access to states, microservices can become stateful streaming apps.”

Vision-oriented Flink Conference:

Our colleagues came back with sparkles in their eyes. When we asked them how they felt about the event, Sabri Skhiri explained:

“Very often, this type of conferences tend to be business oriented. They are focused on how to make the framework easy to use and available to as many people as possible. By contrast, this year’s Flink Forward conference was all about innovation and vision. data Artisans shared their vision of what the Flink framework will be within 3 to 5 years and talked about what role stream processing and big data have within this vision. In fact, almost all the talks were very technical. They were testimonies of big names in the industry, such as Alibaba, Netflix, and ING about problems encountered on the field and how they have been solved, which is often out of the box. The Flink-Alibaba partnership is a sharing one. Alibaba are way ahead with their technology. They keep their lead for 1 year and then they share their work and make their code open source. data Artisans have a great long-term vision of stream processing. I can see a lot of very interesting architecture discussions in the coming months!”

Stream Processing Technology:

When most frameworks cannot process considerable streams of live data and provide results in real time, Flink provides a single runtime for the streaming and batch processing while being highly scalable.

Cyrille Duverne, our Lead Data Architect, confirms: “Flink is definitely a real-time processor! We’re speaking about true real time, not only mini batches etc… Plus, the introduction of ACID transaction management in the new version of data Artisans’ Flink distribution creates a good marketing edge”.

Sabri Skirhi and our R&D engineer Florian Demesmaeker were at the Spark Summit this week. Stay tuned for part 2 with their feedback!