Business accelerated. Throughout the modern era of the web, the cloud and the drive towards what people like to call digital transformation, business has been progressively digitized, automated and accelerated. Customer expectations have spiralled upwards, just as customer attention spans have dwindled and shrunk. Some products and services have become ubiquitously commoditized and therefore differentiated only by price, others have forged strong enough brand ‘uniqueness’ to remain special - but all business functions have been subjected to the force of increased velocity.
Because the speed of business has increased, it’s quite logical for us to think about how the mechanics of our enterprise applications and data services have also accelerated. For many of the apps that organizations will need to work at this new cadence, it’s a question of using real-time data. In the speediest lane of information processing, we find data streaming i.e. systems that are capable of working with data in motion, sometimes with a defined end-point, but sometimes with an unbounded undefined end.
Speed of a squirrel
The software application development community has not been sleeping; it has seen the speed gauge tick upwards and has been developing technology engineered to run faster. Deriving from the open source community foundations that manage the Apache Software Foundation, Apache Flink is a cloud-based service technology used for querying streaming data.
The name Flink comes from the original German term ‘flink’, which translates to nimble, fast and agile - a characteristic of the red squirrel native to Berlin, where Apache Flink was originated and created. The Flink logo is indeed a red squirrel, which German software engineers may well refer to simply as a flink, given the challenge that native German speakers have pronouncing the word squirrel. For the record, this is tough for German speakers because the letters “RL” normally only form an end-cluster consonant pair (as in Karl) and are rarely used as a middle-cluster word structure.
Linguistics aside then, with open source options for building stream processing applications still very much available, Berlin-headquartered Immerok developed a fully managed cloud-native Flink service for large-scale data stream processing and - in January of this year - data streaming platform specialist Confluent announced its acquisition of Immerok. The purchase was explained by Mountain View-headquartered Confluent co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps as a strategic move to bring one of the most popular and powerful stream processing engines directly into Confluent.