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Kubernetes (k8s) has become the predominant deployment platform for Flink. Over the past several years, a number of integrations have been developed that aim to help operationalise operationalize mission-critical Flink applications on k8s. Given the increasing adoption of k8s for Flink deployments, there is interest to provide a k8s native solution as part of Flink that can benefit from the rich experience of community members and ultimately make Flink easier to adopt.

Currently Flink comes with built-in embedded k8s support, also referred to as Flink native k8s [2, 3, 4], providing offering an alternative to the traditional standalone deployment mode. Independently a number of k8s operators have been developed outside of Apache Flink, including [5, 6]. These implementations are not under the umbrella of a neutral entity like the ASF and as a result, tend to lack wider community participation and projects go stale after the maintainers shift focus.

However, the operator concept is custom resource and operator concepts are central to a Kubernetes native deployment experience. It allows to manage Flink applications and their lifecycle through k8s tooling like kubectl. A key feature of an operator is the automation of application upgrades, which cannot be achieved through the "Flink native (embedded) " integration alone.

Public Interfaces

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