What is VERA?

VERA (Ververica Runtime Assembly) is Ververica's cloud-native, ultra-high-performance engine that powers Ververica's Unified Streaming Data Platform. The VERA engine optimizes Apache Flink® and is designed to simplify complex stream processing, making real-time data accessible and actionable for a wider audience. VERA enhances Flink's performance, improves user experience, and addresses key pain points like latency and operational complexity in data stream processing, especially within event-driven architecture contexts. With VERA, you can connect, process, analyze, and govern your data in one ultra-high performance streaming data solution. Created to solve both batch and real-time streaming use cases, VERA makes it easy for you to harness insights from your data at any volume and scale.

Businesses constantly seek ways to derive immediate insights from their ever-growing streams of data. While traditional batch processing is able to solve some use cases, the demand for real-time decision-making is paving the way for advanced stream processing technologies. At the forefront of this evolution is VERA (Ververica Runtime Assembly), a cloud-native engine that serves as the core of Ververica's Unified Streaming Data Platform. VERA revolutionizes Apache Flink, making both powerful real-time stream and batch processing accessible to a broader audience, extending beyond specialized technical experts.

The Genesis of VERA: Addressing Stream Processing Challenges

For over a decade, Apache Flink has been a leading solution for stream processing. However, as data scales exponentially and systems become increasingly distributed, the complexities associated with managing and operationalizing open-source Flink have grown. Many organizations lack the internal resources and specialized expertise required to build and maintain the intricate supporting architectures for complex real-time solutions.

Ververica recognizes these critical pain points. While Flink is the de-facto gold standard streaming project, all projects have limitations. VERA was created to address challenges including Flink's historical single-tenant design, high operational complexity and costs, the "black box" behavior described by developers, and to address an architecture that has not fully evolved to support modern workloads and cloud environments. VERA democratizes stream processing, maintaining 100% compatibility with Flink while solving these known open source limitations.

VERA's Core Purpose and Functionality

VERA’s primary purpose is to simplify the complexities of data stream processing, enabling businesses to operationalize streaming data with ease. It allows users to seamlessly connect, process, analyze, and govern their data within a single, high-performance streaming data solution. VERA optimizes Apache Flink, enhancing its performance and significantly improving the overall user experience.

The capabilities of VERA are built upon three fundamental pillars, designed to provide a unified and efficient approach to real-time data management:

• Streaming Data Movement: This pillar tackles the challenge of disparate data sources (like relational databases such as Postgres or MySQL) that hold critical business information. VERA utilizes Flink Change Data Capture (CDC) to absorb diverse streaming data and events, transforming them into a uniform, actionable format. This process involves loading and transforming data, real-time processing to make it actionable, and delivering the processed data to various destination systems while maintaining data lineage and security. This ensures easy access, formatting, processing, and storage of data, supporting future decision-making, a unified real-time data view, and application development with support for Java, Python, or SQL.
• Real-Time Stream Processing: At its heart, VERA focuses on extracting immediate meaning and insights by processing data in real time, eliminating the historical lag inherent in batch processing. VERA’s architecture decouples storage and compute layers, enabling it to deliver both stream processing and batch processing for stateful computations over data streams. It efficiently manages Flink application execution and integrates seamlessly with Flink APIs, empowering developers to process and analyze vast amounts of data and extract real-time insights. This unified approach facilitates fast, reliable decisions based on the freshest available information, as data can be acted upon immediately upon arrival, regardless of its format.
• Streamhouse (Streaming Lakehouse): This innovative pillar combines Apache Flink for stream processing with Apache Paimon™ on the streaming storage layer. Streamhouse provides a storage solution that merges the benefits of real-time streaming with the cost-effectiveness and query capabilities of traditional Lakehouse batch processing. It allows users to leverage nearly unlimited storage within their stream processing framework, query petabytes (or even exabytes) of data cost-effectively, and perform both real-time and near real-time stream processing from a single engine. This empowers informed decision-making by leveraging both current and historical data.

Key Features and Advantages of VERA

VERA offers a multitude of features and advantages that position it as a leading stream processing framework:

• Ultra-High Performance: VERA is engineered for exceptional speed, capable of processing billions of events per second with sub-second latency. It demonstrates performance up to 2x faster than self-managed open-source Flink.
• Infinite Scalability and Elasticity: With its architecture that separates compute and storage layers, VERA reduces costs and significantly enhances performance, enabling it to scale infinitely to meet demand.
• High Availability and Robust Fault Tolerance: VERA boasts a 99.99% uptime SLA. Its advanced fault-tolerant features, including tiered state and faster checkpoints, ensure uninterrupted operation even in the face of failures, simplifying complexities often found in large stateful applications.
• Cloud-Native Design: VERA is built to run natively in modern cloud environments, leveraging the benefits of cloud infrastructure for resilience and scalability.
• 100% Apache Flink Compatibility: VERA maintains full compatibility with Apache Flink, preventing vendor lock-in and allowing existing Flink users to easily transition and benefit from VERA's optimizations. This commitment ensures a seamless evolution of Flink for modern workloads.
• Simplified Operations and Reduced Cost: By abstracting away much of the operational complexity associated with open-source Flink, VERA reduces the need for extensive internal resources and expertise, lowering operational costs and increasing ROI.
• Developer-Friendly Experience: VERA aims to provide a more intuitive and streamlined experience for developers, allowing them to focus more on business outcomes rather than infrastructure management.
• Unified Batch and Stream Processing: VERA supports continuous processing for both batch and real-time pipelines, allowing for instant access to data and extraction of insights as soon as data becomes available. This addresses the increasing need for converged architectures that handle both historical and real-time data within a single system.
• Security and Data Governance: VERA prioritizes security, streamlines data access management, and supports multi-tenancy and robust data governance policies.

VERA and Event-Driven Architecture

VERA is inherently aligned with an event-driven architecture. In an event-driven system, real-time events drive business processes and decisions. VERA's ability to ingest, process, and analyze data streams in real-time makes it an ideal engine for building responsive and scalable event-driven applications. It transforms raw events into uniform datasets, enabling immediate action and informed decisions as soon as data arrives. This is crucial for modern applications that demand immediate reactions to changes in data, such as fraud detection, personalized recommendations, and real-time analytics dashboards.

The Future of Stream Processing with VERA

VERA democratizes stream processing by simplifying its inherent complexities. The goal is to enable users to effortlessly access both fresh and historical data, facilitating well-informed business decisions. VERA is designed to seamlessly handle both batch and real-time streaming data use cases.

In the near future, users will experience a streamlined process: simply select their deployment method (on-premise or cloud), choose their data sources, fine-tune the solution, and immediately begin to see results, regardless of the specific use case. This innovative approach is also poised to significantly reduce operational costs and enhance ROI, as VERA provides a managed solution that handles updates, feature innovations, and continuous monitoring, effectively eliminating the need for burdensome self-management.

Conclusion

VERA represents a significant leap forward in the realm of data stream processing. By optimizing Apache Flink and delivering a cloud-native, high-performance engine, Ververica has created a solution that addresses the critical needs of modern enterprises. Whether it’s for stream processing with Apache Flink, building an event-driven architecture, or achieving a unified view of real-time and historical data through Streamhouse, VERA empowers organizations to unlock the full potential of their streaming data, enabling faster insights and more agile business operations.