[ANNOUNCE] Weekly Community Update 2020/37

[Konstantin Knauf-4]

Dear community,

happy to share a belated update for the past week. This time with the
release of Flink 1.11.2, a couple of discussions and FLIPs on improving
Flink's APIs and dropping some baggage, most notably Scala 2.11, a new
unified sink API and a bit more.

Flink Development
==============

* [releases] The vote for Flink 1.11.2 has passed today. Release
announcement will follow shortly. [1]

* [releases] Feature Freeze for Stateful Function 2.2.0 happened as planned
five days ago. Release candidate is expected soon. [2]

* [apis] Seth has started a discussion to drop Scala 2.11. Many in favor so
far. [3]

* [apis] Seth proposes to separate the concepts of "Statebackend" and
"Checkpointing" in Flink's APIs. So far, the statebackend (RocksDB vs
Heap-Based) and checkpointing storage (usually a distributed file system)
are handled by the same classes and configured together. He believes this
is the reason for some of the confusion of users around these concepts.
[4,5]

* [apis] Aljoscha started a discussion to deprecate and later
remove UnionList OperatorState. Some current users of UnionList
OperatorState have voiced concerns. No conclusion so far. [6]

* [connectors] Guowei has published FLIP-143 "Unified Sink API". This is
another follow up FLIP in order for the DataStream to supersede the DataSet
API (FLIP-131). The basic idea is to provide an interface that allows the
development of sinks that provide exactly-once guarantees for both bounded
and unbounded workloads, but don't require the developer of the sink to
make this distinction. [6,7]

[1]
http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/RESULT-VOTE-Release-1-11-2-release-candidate-1-tp44731.html
[2]
http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/ANNOUNCE-Feature-freeze-for-Stateful-Functions-2-2-0-tp44606.html
[3]
http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-Drop-Scala-2-11-tp44607.html
[4]
http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-FLIP-142-Disentangle-StateBackends-from-Checkpointing-tp44496.html
[5]
http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/VOTE-FLIP-142-Disentangle-StateBackends-from-Checkpointing-tp44679.html
[6]
http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-Deprecate-and-remove-UnionList-OperatorState-tp44548p44650.html
[7]
http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-FLIP-143-Unified-Sink-API-tp44602.html

flink-packages.org
==============

* Jark has published an implementation of the Nexmark benchmark for Apache
Flink. [8]

[8] https://flink-packages.org/packages/nexmark-benchmark


Notable Bugs
==========

Nothing came to my attention.

Events, Blog Posts, Misc
===================

* Arvid Heise & Niels Basjes are Apache Flink Committers now!
Congratulations to both. [9,10]

* The third video of my colleague Alexander's "Introduction to Flink"
series has been published. This time about building event-driven
applications with Apache Flink. [11]

* On the Ververica Blog, Jark and Qingshen give an outlook to their
upcoming talk at Flink Forward Global [12] on Change Data Capture with
Flink SQL. [13]

[9]
http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/ANNOUNCE-New-Apache-Flink-Committer-Arvid-Heise-tp44713.html
[10]
http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/ANNOUNCE-New-Apache-Flink-Committer-Niels-Basjes-tp44653.html
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t663p-qHijE&feature=youtu.be
[12] https://www.flink-forward.org/global-2020
[13]
https://www.ververica.com/blog/a-deep-dive-on-change-data-capture-with-flink-sql-during-flink-forward

Cheers,

Konstantin


--

Konstantin Knauf

https://twitter.com/snntrable

https://github.com/knaufk