ASF Announces Apache Flink as a Top-Level Project

FOREST HILL, Md., Jan. 12 — The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache Flink has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Flink is an Open Source distributed data analysis engine for batch and streaming data. It offers programming APIs in Java and Scala, as well as specialized APIs for graph processing, with more libraries in the making.

“I am very happy that the ASF has become the home for Flink,” said Stephan Ewen, Vice President of Apache Flink. “For a community-driven effort, I can think of no better umbrella. It is great to see the project is maturing and many new people are joining the community.”

Flink uses a unique combination of streaming/pipelining and batch processing techniques to create a platform that covers and unifies a broad set of batch and streaming data analytics use cases. The project has put significant efforts into making a system that runs reliably and fast in a wide variety of scenarios. For that reason, Flink contained its own type serialization, memory management, and cost-based query optimization components from the early days of the project.

Apache Flink has its roots in the Stratosphere research project that started in 2009 at TU Berlin together with the Berlin and later the European data management communities, including HU Berlin, Hasso Plattner Institute, KTH (Stockholm), ELTE (Budapest), and others. Several Flink committers recently started data Artisans, a Berlin-based startup committed to growing Flink both in code and community as 100% Open Source. More than 70 people have by now contributed to Flink.

“Flink was a pleasure to mentor as a new Apache project,” said Alan Gates, Apache Flink Incubator champion at the ASF, and architect/co-founder at Hortonworks. “The Flink team learned The Apache Way very quickly. They worked hard at being open in their decision making and including new contributors. Those of us mentoring them just needed to point them in the right direction and then let them get to work.”