Thanks Xintong, Sean, and Chris for starting this discussion!
+1 for the initiative!
After reading the FLIP, I have some questions and would love to understand
your thoughts, thanks!
1. Glad to see that Flink Agent will support MCP natively. In this case,
the Flink Agent should be acting as a MCP Host with multiple MCP Clients.
Great choice! Afaiu, one thing MCP tries to do is to standardize the way
how LLMs interact with prompts, tools, etc, via Context and let LLM make
the decision, i.e. the true agentic way. The code example shows
explicitly prompt("..."), tools("...") methods called alongside
mcpServer("...") registration call, which shows additional prompts and
tools context bypasses MCP. May I know the thoughts behind this design?
2. Will A2A protocol also be supported natively like MCP?
3. It is a great idea to encourage asynchronous agent-to-agent
communication, because it will indeed solve a lot of issues. In addition to
that, will synchronous agent-to-agent communication also be considered? I
think there will still be many cases that prefer synchronous agent calls.
4. Currently, common agent frameworks contain two major blocks: 1. Data
pipeline to build embedding(RAG), e.g. LlamaIndex, 2. Agent workflow, e.g.
LlamaIndex Workflow or LangGraph. I can see that Flink can naturally offer
a data pipeline solution in real-time and still need a lot of effort to
build a next level abstraction for it, like parsering, extracting,
embedding, querying, retrieving, etc.. While Agent workflow is more or
less new for Flink. My question is what is the major focus of Flink Agent
as the next step? Data pipeline for embedding vs. workflow, or both?
5. Did you consider Memory for Agent, especially with the real-time
streaming data powered natively by Flink? Some people might think, as LLMs
will support much larger tokens, there will be less and less requirement of
using memory. It is correct for some use cases. For others, considering
cost, hallucination, context switch(like behaviours of human beings),
memory might still be a very important component for Agents.
Best regards,
Jing
On Wed, May 21, 2025 at 5:56 AM Jingsong Li <jingsongl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Xintong, Sean, and Chris for starting this discussion.
>
> +1 to initial Flink Agents sub project.
>
> Look forward to its first release!
>
> Best,
> Jingsong
>
> On Wed, May 21, 2025 at 11:21 AM Xintong Song <tonysong...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > 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
>
