At Flink Forward Europe 2019, Stephan Ewen from ververica announced the release of Stateful Functions, an open-source framework that reduces the complexity of building and orchestrating distributed stateful applications at scale. Stateful Functions brings together the benefits of stream processing with Apache Flink and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) to provide a powerful abstraction for the next generation of event-driven architectures.
In this article, we will explain the motivation behind building Stateful Functions, and why we proposed the project to the Apache Flink community as an open-source contribution.