[ANNOUNCE] Weekly Community Update 2019/28

[Konstantin Knauf-2]

Dear community, 

happy to share this weeks community update with Apache Flink 1.9, bylaws for Apache Flink, Savepoints vs Checkpoints, Flink on ARM, and more.

As always, please feel free to add additional updates and news to this thread!

Flink Development

===============

* [releases] The release branch for Apache Flink 1.9.0 has been cut lasat Thursday and we are moving on to release testing. [1]

* [development process] Following the discussion on our FLIP process. Becket has initiated a discussion [2] on writing up bylaws for Apache Flink, a set of rules governing the core processes of the community. The plan to add bylaws was very well received and the discussion quickly moved to the first draft [3] of these bylaws.

[development process] The migration of our CI infrastructure [4] to a non-ASF Travis account [5] has been implemented very quickly by Chesnay. Updates to the CI bot are currently discussed in a new thread [6].

* [development process] Robert opened a PR [7] to add the code style and quality guide to the contribution guide on the Apache Flink website. If you have not checked out the guide yet, now is good time ;) 

* [docs] In the course of FLIP-42 Konstantin added a first version of a glossary [8] to the Flink documentation defining frequently used terms like Operators, Task, Partition, a.s.o. This can help us to use a common terminology in our documentation as well as on the mailing lists.

* [state management] Kostas has started a FLIP(-47) [9] on how to think about savepoints vs checkpoints in the future. In a nutshell, the FLIP proposes to waive the distinction between savepoints & checkpoints: both would simply be snapshots. Each snapshot can have different properties depending on its origin (system/user) and format (incremental, universal,...). The topic has also been addressed by Yu Li in FLIP-45 [10] recently.

* [build] Xiyuan Wang has started a discussion about officially supporting Apache Flink on ARM-based systems. It looks like there are no big blockers on the technical side and the discussion currently focuses on integrating an ARM-based build into our CI infrastructure. [11]

[1] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/ANNOUNCE-Flink-1-9-release-branch-has-been-created-tp30500.html

[2] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-Flink-project-bylaws-tp30409.html

[3] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=120731026

[4] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-solve-unstable-build-capacity-problem-on-TravisCI-tp29881.html

[5] https://travis-ci.com/flink-ci

[6] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/CiBot-Update-td30536.html

[7] https://github.com/apache/flink-web/pull/224

[8] https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-master/concepts/glossary.html

[9] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/FLIP-47-Savepoints-vs-Checkpoints-tp30324.html

[10] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-FLIP-45-Reinforce-Job-Stop-Semantic-tp30161.html

[11]  http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-ARM-support-for-Flink-td30298.html

Notable Bugs

===========

Quite a lot of bugs are being opened right now, but these are basically all related to release testing for Flink 1.9 or test instabilities - hence not affecting released versions of Apache Flink.

[FLINK-11654] [1.7.2] [1.8.1] I recently sumbled across this tickcet of the (exatly-once) FlinkKafkaProducer, which was already created back in February. When running multiple instances of the same Flink program with an exactly-once FlinkKafkaProducer, the transational ids used by these producers can clash (both jobs use the same ids) and the jobs crash frequently. The resolution is currently under discussion. [12]

[12] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-11654

Events, Blog Posts, Misc

====================

* Flink Forward Europe early-bird ends on the 15th of July. [13]

* Upcoming Meetups

    * On 18th of July Christos Hadjinikolis is speaking at the "Big Data LDN Meetup" on "How real-time data processing is used for application in customer experience?" [14]

* Rong Rong is now an Apache Flink Committer. Congratulations! [15]

[13] https://berlin-2019.flink-forward.org/

[14] https://www.meetup.com/big-data-ldn/events/262638878/

[15] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/ANNOUNCE-Rong-Rong-becomes-a-Flink-committer-td30451.html#a30474

Cheers and have a nice evening,

Konstantin (@snntrable)

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