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Posted to issues@flink.apache.org by GitBox <gi...@apache.org> on 2022/04/28 12:41:47 UTC
[GitHub] [flink-web] zentol commented on a diff in pull request #526: Announcement blogpost for the 1.15 release
zentol commented on code in PR #526:
URL: https://github.com/apache/flink-web/pull/526#discussion_r860841120
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_posts/2022-04-26-1.15-announcement.md:
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@@ -0,0 +1,434 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Announcing the Release of Apache Flink 1.15"
+subtitle: ""
+date: 2022-04-26T08:00:00.000Z
+categories: news
+authors:
+- yungao:
+ name: "Yun Gao"
+ twitter: "YunGao16"
+- joemoe:
+ name: "Joe Moser"
+ twitter: "JoemoeAT"
+
+---
+
+Thanks to our well-organized and open community, Apache Flink continues
+[to grow](https://www.apache.org/foundation/docs/FY2021AnnualReport.pdf) as a
+technology and remain one of the most active projects in
+the Apache community. With the release of Flink 1.15, we are proud to announce a number of
+exciting changes.
+
+One of the main concepts that makes Apache Flink stand out is the unification of
+batch (aka bounded) and stream (aka unbounded) data processing. A lot of
+effort went into this unification in the previous releases but you can expect more efforts in this direction.
+Apache Flink is not only growing when it comes to contributions and users, but
+also out of the original use cases. We are seeing a trend towards more business/analytics
+use cases implemented in low-/no-code. Flink SQL is the feature in the Flink ecosystem
+that enables such uses cases and this is why its popularity continues to grow.
+
+Apache Flink is an essential building block in data pipelines/architectures and
+is used with many other technologies in order to drive all sorts of use cases. While new ideas/products
+may appear in this domain, existing technologies continue to establish themselves as standards for solving
+mission-critical problems. Knowing that we have such a wide reach and play a role in the success of many
+projects, it is important that the experience of
+integrating with Apache Flink is as seamless and easy as possible.
+
+In the 1.15 release the Apache Flink community made significant progress across all
+these areas. Still those are not the only things that made it into 1.15. The
+contributors improved the experience of operating Apache Flink by making it much
+easier and more transparent to handle checkpoints and savepoints and their ownership,
+making auto scaling more seamless and complete, by removing side effects of use cases
+in which different data sources produce varying amounts of data, and - finally - the
+ability to upgrade SQL jobs without losing the state. By continuing on supporting
+checkpoints after tasks finished and adding window table valued functions in batch
+mode, the experience of unified stream and batch processing was once more improved
+making hybrid use cases way easier. In the SQL space, not only the first step in
+version upgrades have been added but also JSON functions to make it easier to import
+and export structured data in SQL. Both will allow users to better rely on Flink SQL
+for production use cases in the long term. To establish Apache Flink as part of the
+data processing ecosystem we improved the cloud interoperability and added more sink
+connectors and formats. And yes we enabled a Scala-free runtime
+([the hype is real](https://flink.apache.org/2022/02/22/scala-free.html)).
+
+
+## Operating Apache Flink with ease
+
+Even Flink jobs that have been built and tuned by the best engineering teams still need to
+be operated, usually on a long-term basis. The many deployment
+patterns, APIs, tuneable configs, and use cases covered by Apache Flink mean that operation
+support is vital and can be burdensome.
+
+In this release, we listened to user feedback and now operating Flink is made much
+easier. It is now more transparent in terms of handling checkpoints and savepoints and their ownership,
+which makes auto-scaling more seamless and complete (by removing side effects of use cases
+where different data sources produce varying amounts of data) and enables the
+ability to upgrade SQL jobs without losing the state.
+
+
+### Clarification of checkpoint and savepoint semantics
+
+An essential cornerstone of Flink’s fault tolerance strategy is based on
+[checkpoints](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-release-1.15/docs/ops/state/checkpoints/) and
+[savepoints](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-release-1.15/docs/ops/state/savepoints/) (see [the comparison](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-release-1.15/docs/ops/state/checkpoints_vs_savepoints/)).
+The purpose of savepoints has always been to put transitions,
+backups, and upgrades of Flink jobs in the control of users. Checkpoints, on
+the other hand, are intended to be fully controlled by Flink and guarantee fault
+tolerance through fast recovery, failover, etc. Both concepts are quite similar and
+the underlying implementation also shares aspects of the same ideas.
+
+However, both concepts grew apart by following specific feature requests and sometimes
+neglecting the overarching idea and strategy. Based on user feedback, it became apparent that this should be
+aligned and harmonized better and, above all, to make more clear!
+
+There have been situations in which users relied on checkpoints to stop/restart jobs when savepoints would have
+been the right way to go. It was also not clear that savepoints are slower since they don’t include
+some of the features that make taking checkpoints so fast. In some cases like
+resuming from a retained checkpoint - where the checkpoint is somehow considered as
+a savepoint - it is unclear to the user when they can actually clean it up.
+
+With [FLIP-193 (Snapshots ownership)](https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-193%3A+Snapshots+ownership)
+the community aims to make ownership the only difference between savepoints and
+checkpoints. In the 1.15 release the community has fixed some of those shortcomings
+by supporting
+[native and incremental savepoints](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-release-1.15/docs/ops/state/savepoints/#savepoint-format).
+Savepoints always used to use the
+canonical format which made them slower. Also writing full savepoints for sure takes
+longer than doing it in an incremental way. With 1.15 if users use the native format
+to take savepoints as well as the RocksDB state backend, savepoints will be
+automatically taken in an incremental manner. The documentation has also been
+clarified to provide a better overview and understanding of the differences between
+checkpoints and savepoints. The semantics for
+[resuming from savepoint/retained checkpoint](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-release-1.15/docs/ops/state/savepoints/#resuming-from-savepoints)
+have also been clarified introducing the CLAIM and NO_CLAIM mode. With
+the CLAIM mode Flink takes over ownership of an existing snapshot, with NO_CLAIM it
+creates its own copy and leaves the existing one up to the user. Please note that
+NO_CLAIM mode is the new default behavior. The old semantic of resuming from
+savepoint/retained checkpoint is still accessible but has to be manually selected by
+choosing LEGACY mode.
+
+
+### Elastic scaling with reactive mode and the adaptive scheduler
+
+Driven by the increasing number of cloud services built on top of Apache Flink, the
+project is becoming more and more cloud native which makes elastic
+scaling even more important.
+
+This release improves metrics for the [reactive mode](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-master/docs/deployment/elastic_scaling/#reactive-mode), which is a job-scope mode where the JobManager will try to use all TaskManager resources available. To do this, we made all the metrics in
+the Job scope work correctly when reactive mode is enabled.
+
+We also added an exception history for the [adaptive scheduler](https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-160%3A+Adaptive+Scheduler), which is a new scheduler that first declares the required resources and waits for them before deciding on the parallelism with which to execute a job.
+
+Furthermore, downscaling is sped up significantly. The TaskManager now has a dedicated
+shutdown code path, where it actively deregisters itself from the cluster instead
+of relying on heartbeats, giving the JobManager a clear signal for downscaling.
+
+
+### Adaptive batch scheduler
+
+In 1.15, we introduced a new scheduler to Apache Flink: the
+[Adaptive Batch Scheduler](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-release-1.15/docs/deployment/elastic_scaling/#adaptive-batch-scheduler).
+The new scheduler can automatically decide parallelisms of job vertices for batch jobs,
+according to the size of data volume each vertex needs to process.
+
+Major benefits of this scheduler includes:
+
+1. Ease-of-use: Batch job users can be relieved from parallelism tuning.
+2. Adaptive: Automatically tuned parallelisms can better fit consumed datasets which
+ have a varying volume size every day.
+3. Fine-grained: Parallelism of each job vertex will be tuned individually. This allows
+ vertices of SQL batch jobs to be automatically assigned different proper parallelisms.
+
+
+### Watermark alignment across data sources
+
+Having data sources that increase watermarks at different paces could lead to
+problems with downstream operators. For example, some operators might need to buffer excessive
+amounts of data which could lead to huge operator states. This is why we introduced watermark alignment
+in this release.
+
+For sources based on the new source interface,
+[watermark alignment](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-release-1.15/docs/dev/datastream/event-time/generating_watermarks/#watermark-alignment-_beta_)
+can be activated. Users can define
+alignment groups to pause consuming from sources which are too far ahead from others. The ideal scenario for aligned watermarks is when there are two or more
+sources that produce watermarks at a different speed and when the source has the same
+parallelism as splits/shards/partitions.
+
+
+### SQL version upgrades
+
+The execution plan of SQL queries and its resulting topology is based on optimization
+rules and a cost model. This means that even minimal changes could introduce a completely
+different topology. This dynamism makes guaranteeing snapshot compatibility
+very challenging across different Flink versions. In the efforts of 1.15, the community focused
+on keeping the same query (via the same topology) up and running even after upgrades.
+
+At the core of SQL upgrades are JSON plans
+([please note that we only have documentation in our JavaDocs for now and are still working on updating the documentation](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-release-1.15/api/java/org/apache/flink/table/api/CompiledPlan.html)), which are JSON functions that make it easier to import and export structured data in SQL. This has been introduced for
+internal use already in previous releases and will now be exposed externally. Both the Table API
+and SQL will provide a way to compile and execute a plan which guarantees the same
+topology throughout different versions. This feature will be released as an experimental MVP.
+Users who want to give it a try already can create a JSON plan that can then be used
+to restore a Flink job based on the old operator structure. The full feature can be expected
+in Flink 1.16.
+
+Reliable upgrades makes Flink SQL more dependable for production use cases in the long term.
+
+
+### Changelog state backend
+
+In Flink 1.15, we introduced the MVP feature of the
+[changelog state backend](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-release-1.15/docs/ops/state/state_backends/#enabling-changelog),
+which aims at
+making checkpoint intervals shorter and more predictable with the following advantages:
+
+1. Shorter end-to-end latency: end-to-end latency mostly depends on the checkpointing
+ mechanism, especially for transactional sinks. Transactional sinks commit on
+ checkpoints, so faster checkpoints mean more frequent commits.
+2. More predictable checkpoint intervals: currently checkpointing time largely depends
+ on the size of the artifacts that need to be persisted on the checkpoint storage.
+ By keeping the size consistently small, checkpointing time becomes more predictable.
+3. Less work on recovery: with more frequently checkpoints are taken, less data need
+ to be re-processed after each recovery.
+
+The changelog state backend helps achieve the above by continuously
+persisting state changes on non-volatile storage while performing state materialization
+in the background.
+
+
+### Repeatable cleanup
+
+In previous releases of Flink, cleaning up job-related artifacts was done only once which might have resulted in abandoned artifacts in case of an error. In this version, Flink will try to run the cleanup again to avoid leaving artifacts behind. This retry mechanism runs until it was successful, by default. Users can change this behavior by configuring the [repeatable cleanup options](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-release-1.15/docs/deployment/config/#retryable-cleanup). Disabling the retry strategy will lead to Flink behaving like in previous releases.
+
+There is still work in progress around cleaning up checkpoints, which is covered by
+[FLINK-26606](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-26606).
+
+
+### OpenAPI
+
+Flink is now providing the REST API specifications following the
+[OpenAPI](https://www.openapis.org) standard.
+This allows the REST API to be used with standard tools that are implementing the
+OpenAPI standard.
+You can find the specifications [here](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-master/docs/ops/rest_api/#jobmanager).
Review Comment:
```suggestion
Flink is now providing an experimental REST API specification following the
[OpenAPI](https://www.openapis.org) standard.
This allows the REST API to be used with standard tools that are implementing the
OpenAPI standard.
You can find the specification [here](https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-master/docs/ops/rest_api/#jobmanager).
```
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