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About externalization

The Flink community has created and maintains multiple Flink connectors, which can be found in multiple locations.

The Flink community wants to improve on the overall connector ecosystem, which includes that we want to move existing connectors out of Flink's main repository and as a result decouple the release cycle of Flink with the release cycles of the connectors. This should result in:

• Faster releases of connectors: New features can be added more quickly, bugs can be fixed immediately, and we can have faster security patches in case of direct or indirect (through dependencies) security flaws.
• Adding newer connector features to older Flink versions: By having stable connector APIs, the same connector artifact may be used with different Flink versions. Thus, new features can also immediately be used with older Flink versions. 
• More activity and contributions around connectors: By easing the contribution and development process around connectors, we will see faster development and also more connectors.
• Standardized documentation and user experience for the connectors, regardless of where they are maintained. 
• A faster Flink CI: By not needing to build and test connectors, the Flink CI pipeline will be faster and Flink developers will experience fewer build stabilities (which mostly come from connectors). That should speed up Flink development.

The following has been discussed and agreed by the Flink community with regards to connectors:

• All connector repositories will remain under the ASF, which means that code will still be hosted at https://github.com/apache and all ASF policies will be followed. 
• Each connector will end up in its own connector repository. For example, https://github.com/apache/flink-connector-kafka for a Kafka connector, https://github.com/apache/flink-connector-elasticsearch for an Elasticsearch connector etc.

• The following connectors will be moved out from Flink's main repository to an individual repository:

  Kafka Upsert-Kafka Cassandra Elasticsearch Firehose Kinesis RabbitMQ Google Cloud PubSub Pulsar JDBC HBase Hive

  
  

• Only the following connectors will remain in Flink's main repository:

  Hybrid Source FileSystem DataGen Print BlackHole

  
  

• PRs for new connectors to Flink's main repository should not be merged, as these new connectors should also be hosted outside of Flink's main repository. If you have a connector that you would like to build or maintain, please reach out to the Flink Dev mailing list https://flink.apache.org/community.html for more information to get started using the external connector repository setup. 
• The discussion threads on these topics can be found in:
  • [DISCUSS] Creating an external connector repository
  • [DISCUSS] Moving connectors from Flink to external connector repositories
  • [DISCUSS] Plan to externalize connectors and versioning

This document outlines common rules for connectors that are developed & released separately from Flink (otherwise known as "externalized").

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