Dear Flink Community! Some of you probably heard it already: On Tuesday, at Flink Forward Berlin, we announced **Stateful Functions**.
Stateful Functions is a library on Flink to implement general purpose applications. It is built around stateful functions (who would have thunk) that can communicate arbitrarily through messages, have consistent state, and a small resource footprint. They are a bit like keyed ProcessFunctions that can send each other messages. As simple as this sounds, this means you can now communicate in non-DAG patterns, so it allows users to build programs they cannot build with Flink. It also has other neat properties, like multiplexing of functions, modular composition, tooling both container-based deployments and as-a-Flink-job deployments. You can find out more about it here - Website: https://statefun.io/ - Code: https://github.com/ververica/stateful-functions - Talk with motivation: https://speakerdeck.com/stephanewen/stateful-functions-building-general-purpose-applications-and-services-on-apache-flink?slide=12 Now for the main issue: **We would like to contribute this project to Apache Flink** I believe that this is a great fit for both sides. For the Flink community, it would be a way to extend the capabilities and use cases of Flink into a completely different type of applications and thus grow the community into this new field. Many discussions recently about evolving the Flink runtime (both on the mailing list and at conferences) show the interest in Flink users in the space that Stateful Functions covers. It seems natural that Stateful Functions should closely co-develop with Apache Flink, ideally as part of the project. There are many details to be discusses, for example whether this should be added to the Flink core repository, or whether we and to create a separate repository for this. But I think we should start discussing this after we have consensus on whether the community wants this contribution. Really looking forward to hear what you think! Best Regards, Stephan
