Alibaba Acquires Apache Flink Backer data Artisans

Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group has acquired data Artisans, the German company behind the Apache Flink data processing framework. Alibaba is one of the biggest users of Flink, and plans to continue developing and Flink and contributing enhancements back to the open source project. Apache Flink originated from the Stratosphere research project at the Technical University of Berlin in 2009, and in 2015 became a top level project at the Apache Software Foundation. The software features a dataflow engine developed in Java and Scala that's designed to run batch and streaming analytic workloads on distributed systems, including Hadoop clusters and cloud-based systems. Flink is a contemporary of Apache Spark, and in fact boasted certain advantages over Spark, particularly when it comes to real-time streaming analytics, although Spark closed the gap last year when it replaced "micro-batch" streaming with a more continuous approach.