Hi devs, Sean, Chris and I would like to start a discussion on FLIP-531 [1], about introducing a new sub-project, Flink Agents.
With the rise of agentic AI, we have identified great new opportunities for Flink, particularly in the system-triggered agent scenarios. We believe the future of AI agent applications is industrialized, where agents will not only be triggered by users, but increasingly by systems as well. Flink's event capabilities in real-time distributed event processing, state management and exact-once consistency fault tolerance make it well-suited as a framework for building such system-triggered agents. Furthermore, system-triggered agents are often tightly coupled with data processing. Flink's outstanding data processing capabilities allows seamless integration between data and agentic processing. These capabilities differentiate Flink from other agent frameworks with unique advantages in the context of system-triggered agents. We propose this effort as a sub-project of Apache Flink, with a separate code repository and lightweight developing process, for rapid iteration during the early stage. Please note that this FLIP is focused on the high-level plans, including motivation, positioning, goals, roadmap, and operating model of the project. Detailed technical design is out of the scope and will be discussed during the rapid prototyping and iterations. For more details, please check the FLIP [1]. Looking forward to your feedback. Best, Xintong [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-531%3A+Initiate+Flink+Agents+as+a+new+Sub-Peoject
