Hi Sean, Chris and Xintong. This seems to be a very exciting sub-project. +1 for "flink-agents" sub-project.
I was going through the FLIP , and had some questions regarding the same: 1. How would the external model calls (e.g., OpenAI or internal LLMs) integrated into Flink tasks without introducing backpressure or latency issues? In my experience, calling an external LLM has the following risks: Latency-sensitive (LLM inference can take hundreds of milliseconds to seconds), Flaky (network issues, rate limits) as well as it is Non-deterministic (with timeouts, retries, etc.). It would be great to work/brainstorm on how we solve these issues. 2. In traditional agent workflows, user feedback often plays a key role in validating and improving agent outputs. In a continuous, long-running Flink-based agent system, where interactions might not be user-facing or synchronous, how do we incorporate human-in-the-loop feedback or correctness signals to validate and iteratively improve agent behavior? This is a really exciting direction for the Flink ecosystem. The idea of building long-running, context-aware agents natively on Flink feels like a natural evolution of stream processing. I'd love to see this mature and would be excited to contribute in any way I can to help productionize and validate this in real-world use cases. On Wed, May 21, 2025 at 8:52 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 >
