Flink in Containerland

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Apache Flink, a powerful distributed stateful stream processing framework, is an especially good fit for deployment on a containerization platform: its storage requirement is primarily external (e.g. HDFS or S3), clusters often share the lifetime of the jobs that run on them, and the flexibility of allocating resources on such a platform allows for scaling jobs up and down as necessary. In this talk I will give a brief introduction to Apache Flink, then describe the journey to making it a first-class citizen of the container world. I will cover my experience preparing to publish the “official repository” of Flink images on Docker Hub, the challenges of fitting a Flink deployment in a Kubernetes-shaped box, and the rough edges of Flink itself that were exposed by this process.