Great to see this discussion getting started — thanks Xintong, Sean, and
Chris!
+1 to initial Flink Agents sub project.
Best,
Guowei
On Wed, May 21, 2025 at 5:52 PM Jing Ge <j...@ververica.com.invalid> wrote:
> 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
> >
>
