Flink Forward Asia 2023 Recap: Keynote Highlights, Technical Advances, and Community Updates

On December 8‑9, 2023, the Apache‑authorized Flink Forward Asia (FFA) summit, hosted by Alibaba Cloud, successfully took place.

In the opening address, Alibaba Cloud Vice President Wang Junhua emphasized continued collaboration between Alibaba Cloud and open‑source partners to give developers flexible choices and to feed technology back into the community.

Keynote speaker Wang Feng, initiator of the Apache Flink Chinese community and Paimon PMC member, presented “Flink Has Become the De‑facto Standard of Streaming Compute,” noting Flink’s global community activity and its SIGMOD 2023 Systems Award, with Chinese contributors accounting for over 50% of contributions.

Wang Feng reviewed 2023’s core Flink progress: releases 1.17 and 1.18, continuous improvements to Streaming SQL, full rollout of universal incremental checkpoints, production‑ready Flink Batch, a 54% performance boost in 1.18 over 1.16, a new elastic scaling paradigm, enhanced cloud‑native capabilities, and the classic Flink + Paimon combination that accelerates adoption of the Lakehouse architecture.

Case study presenter Shi Hefu from Cao Cao Chuxing shared that real‑time compute resources grew from 20% to 50% of their workload, driving a 60% increase in subsidy efficiency and a 20% boost in driver efficiency across decision‑making and operations.

Li Jinsong, founder of Paimon and Flink PMC member, together with guests from Tongcheng Travel, Autohome, and China Unicom Digital Technology, demonstrated how to build a Streaming Lakehouse using Flink + Paimon and the business gains of this “golden combo.”

Wang Chong, head of Flink SQL and Flink CDC at Alibaba Cloud, announced the release of Flink CDC 3.0, a brand‑new end‑to‑end real‑time data integration framework with a simplified developer experience, marking the next step in its open‑source journey.

In “The Next Generation of Apache Flink,” Song Xintong, Flink distributed execution lead and Flink 2.0 Release Manager, outlined three technical directions for the coming year—Streaming, Batch‑Streaming Unification, and Experience Improvements—and disclosed the planned timeline for Flink 2.0, slated for release in October of the following year.

For photos, visit the cloud album at https://live.photoplus.cn/live/75591430?accessFrom=live#/list . The official conference website is https://flink-forward.org.cn/ , where video recordings can be accessed via QR code or the ApacheFlink video channel.