Apache Flink 1.6.0: What’s new in the latest Apache Flink release

The Apache Flink® community has just release v. 1.6.0 with major improvements and additions to the technology. The community worked hard in the last 2+ months to resolve more than 360 issues and is proud to introduce the latest Flink version to the streaming community.

Flink 1.6.0 continues on the same basis and fundamental groundwork that the community has laid out in previous versions: All new additions and improvements aim at empowering Flink users to build fast data analytics and data-driven applications as easy as possible.

In more detail, the improvements in Flink 1.6.0 focus around the following four features:

• Simplifying Apache Flink’s state with the addition of native support for state TTL. This feature allows to clean up state after it has expired. With Flink 1.6.0 timer state can now go out of core by storing the relevant state in RocksDB. Moreover, the team improved the deletion of timers significantly.

• Support for resource elasticity and different deployment scenarios (such as better container integration). Flink 1.6.0 comes with HTTP/REST based external communications and job submissions as well as a container entrypoint for simplified bootstrapping of containerized job clusters.

• Further improvements to the Streaming SQL CLI, including simplifying the executions of streaming and batch queries against different data sources, adding full Avro support for reading easily any kind of Avro data and hardening Flink’s CEP library to handle significantly larger state sizes compared to past versions.

• Improved Flink connectors allowing better integration with external systems. The additions to Flink 1.6.0 include a new StreamingFileSink that replaces the `BucketingSink` as the standard file sink from previous versions, support for ElasticSearch 6.x and different AvroDeserializationSchemas to seamlessly ingest Avro data.

You can read and download the release including a detailed view of all new features and improvements that were merged to the latest Apache Flink®.