Flink Forward San Francisco 2019 welcomes an ever-growing community

BERLIN, Apr 16, 2019 — Flink Forward, the premier event for Apache Flink^® and the open source stream processing community, took stage in San Francisco, April 1-2 for its largest ever conference in the US. With a growth of +35% year-over-year in attendance, this edition attracted delegates from top technology companies and featured 30+ sessions across five tracks.

Event Highlights

For the first time, training delivered by Ververica expanded to three different tracks:

• Introduction to Streaming with Apache Flink
• Analyzing Streaming Data with Flink SQL and
• Apache Flink Troubleshooting & Operations

The Apache Flink training executed by Ververica now caters for the needs of users willing to democratize the use of stream processing through declarative, high-level language or dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of productionizing Apache Flink.

The conference kicked off with a joint keynote from Ververica and Alibaba outlining Flink’s roadmap and a detailed timeline of the Blink code integration into the open source repository. The speakers also presented plans to continue to evolve the framework towards a unified data processing system, focusing future developments on batch processing, Machine Learning and streaming analytics, Data Warehouse integration features and SQL as a first class citizen in Apache Flink.

Multiple breakout sessions were delivered throughout the day, ranging from technology deep-dives to use case demonstrations from leading industry experts such as Airbnb, Comcast, Netflix, Lyft or Splunk. Some highlight sessions include:

• From Stream Processor to a Unified Data Processing System.
• Massive Scale Data Processing at Netflix using Flink
• Building production Flink jobs with Airstream at Airbnb
• Analytics for the masses
• TensorFlow Extended: An end-to-end machine learning platform for TensorFlow

Satellite Community Events

Over 1,600 Flink enthusiasts tuned in to a global broadcast led by Bowen Li, Apache Flink Committer, for a Flink Forward summary. In addition, community meetups took place in Seattle and New York with more than 130 attendees:

• New York, April 4: Stephan Ewen talked about how stream processing is outgrowing its original space of real-time data processing and rapidly maturing into a technology for enabling new approaches to general data processing with use cases that include batch processing, real-time applications and distributed transactions.

• Seattle, April 4: Kostas Tzoumas reinforced the plan to make Flink a unified data processing system and Tom Kaitchuck (Senior Consulting Engineer, Dell EMC) delivered an overview of different techniques for achieving exactly-once processing of streaming data with Flink and Pravega.

Ververica Partner Program

Ververica also unveiled pre-registration to the Ververica Partner Program to meet the increasing demand for stream processing applications and expand the delivery of a best-in-class experience with Apache Flink with the following categories:

• Ververica Platform Partner
• Ververica Service Partner

The next events in line are Flink Forward Europe 2019 Berlin, October 7-9 and Flink Forward Asia 2019 in late November. Call for papers and early bird registration for Berlin are open. Join the discussion on Twitter to stay on top of upcoming announcements.

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