Open Source distributed Big Data system for expressive, declarative, and efficient batch and streaming data processing and analysis
Forest Hill, MD –12 January 2015– 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.
"Becoming a Top-Level Project in such short time is a great milestone for Flink and reflects the speed with which the community has been growing," said Kostas Tzoumas, co-founder and CEO of data Artisans. "The community is currently working on some exciting new features that make Flink even more powerful and accessible to a wider audience, and several companies around the world are including Flink in their data infrastructure."
"We use Apache Flink as part of our production data infrastructure," said Ijad Madisch, co-founder and CEO of ResearchGate. "We are happy all around and excited that Flink provides us with the opportunity for even better developer productivity and testability, especially for complex data flows. It’s with good reason that Flink is now a top-level Apache project."
"I have been experimenting with Flink, and we are very excited to hear that Flink is becoming a top-level Apache project," said Anders Arpteg, Analytics Machine Learning Manager at Spotify.
Denis Arnaud, Head of Data Science Development of Travel Intelligence at Amadeus said, "At Amadeus, we continually seek for better improvement in our analytic platform and our experiments with Apache Flink for analytics on our travel data show a lot of potential in the system for our production use."
"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."
Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Flink software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For documentation and ways to become involved with Apache Flink, visit http://flink.apache.org/ and @ApacheFlink on Twitter.
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 500 individual Members and 4,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Cerner, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.
© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Apache Flink", "Flink", ApacheCon", and the Apache Flink logo are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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