We are excited to announce the release of Ververica Platform Community Edition — the easiest way to get started with Apache Flink! With the Community Edition of Ververica Platform, we are making it easier and faster-than-ever to get started with Apache Flink and leverage the combined experience and best practice of the largest and most demanding Flink deployments worldwide.
Why Ververica Platform Community Edition?
What is our motivation behind launching Ververica Platform Community Edition? We have worked from day one with some of the biggest Apache Flink adopters globally, deploying Flink at massive scale. Working for multiple years with these companies allowed our team to gather significant best practices for developing and deploying Flink applications across any environment. With the launch of the Community Edition, we now want to enable any engineering organization — no matter its size or industry — to leverage our accumulated knowledge and experience from the get-go.
The Community Edition of Ververica Platform is - and will remain - free for commercial and production use and does not give a limit on the number or size of the managed Apache Flink applications.
Ververica Platform Community Edition Features
Ververica Platform Community Edition comes with all the core features around deployment, configuration and application lifecycle management that also constitute the foundational blocks of our enterprise editions of the platform.
A Turn-Key Solution in the Cloud & On-Premise
Community Edition is a turn-key solution for real time stream processing and streaming analytics, available both in the cloud and on-premise, with minimal requirements, namely a Kubernetes cluster and a distributed file system. The platform provides simple artifact management and Flink Master failover out-of-the-box and supports all major hosted Kubernetes services, as well as OpenShift, while it seamlessly integrates with third-party services for artifact storage, logging & metrics, and CI/CD.
Application Lifecycle Management for Stateful Stream Processing
Over time, your Apache Flink application code will most likely evolve, you will fix bugs, and upgrade to newer Apache Flink versions, all while ensuring that the application state is preserved throughout the process. Ververica Platform manages all of the above for you based on a declarative description of the desired state of your Apache Flink deployment. It allows you to perform different, flexible upgrade strategies as well as to fork and “time-travel” in the streams your application consumes.
Web User Interface & REST API
Ververica Platform provides both a web-based user interface and a REST API. The user interface allows developers to easily monitor, control, and configure stream processing applications, without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
In addition to the web-based user interface, the platform provides a REST API. All features available in the web user interface are also available through this API. We provide an API specification based on Swagger so that users can easily build their own integrations on top of the API. One common use case of the REST API is the integration with automated deployment systems, for example, as part of a CI/CD pipeline.
Getting Started in 5 Minutes
Ververica Platform can be installed via Helm into any Kubernetes cluster. It is as easy as adding our Helm repository and running helm install.
$ helm repo add ververica https://charts.ververica.com
$ helm install vvp ververica/ververica-platform
In order to use Ververica Platform Community Edition, you need to accept our Community Edition License Agreement. Please read the license agreement carefully, and afterwards, accept it by passing the corresponding flag via Helm:
$ helm install vvp ververica/ververica-platform \
--set acceptCommunityEditionLicense=true
Now, you can access the web user interface and the REST API with a port-forward from the Ververica Platform Kubernetes service.
$ kubectl port-forward service/vvp-ververica-platform 8080:80
Both interfaces are now available under localhost:8080. For example, in order to list all Apache Flink Deployments (initially none) via the REST API use the following request.
$ curl localhost:8080/api/v1/namespaces/defaults/deployments -H "Accept: application/yaml"
We are very excited to bring Community Edition to life and provide developers and software engineers with a battle-tested stream processing platform as the easiest way to get started with Apache Flink. You can try out the Community Edition of Ververica Platform for free now and contact our team at community-edition@ververica.com or through our dedicated Ververica Platform Knowledge Base with any questions, feedback or suggestions. Happy streaming!
