Overview

Apache Flink Agents is a brand-new sub-project from the Apache Flink community, providing an open-source framework for building event-driven streaming agents.

Building on Flink’s battle-tested streaming engine, Apache Flink Agents inherits distributed, at-scale, fault-tolerant structured data processing and mature state management, and adds first-class abstractions for Agentic AI building blocks and functionalities - large language models (LLMs), prompts, tools memory, dynamic orchestration, observability, and more.

Features #

The key features of Apache Flink Agents include:

  • Massive Scale and Millisecond Latency: Processes massive-scale event streams in real time, leveraging Flink’s distributed processing engine.
  • Seamless Data and AI Integration: Agents interact directly with Flink’s DataStream and Table APIs for input and output, enabling a smooth integration of structured data processing and semantic AI capabilities within Flink.
  • Exactly-Once Action Consistency: Ensures exactly-once consistency for agent actions and their side effects by integrating Flink’s checkpointing with an external write-ahead log.
  • Familiar Agent Abstractions: Leverages well-known AI agent concepts, making it easy for developers experienced with agent-based systems to quickly adopt and build on Apache Flink Agents without a steep learning curve.
  • Multi-Language Supports: Provides native APIs in both Python and Java, enabling seamless integration into diverse development environments and allowing teams to use their preferred programming language.
  • Rich Ecosystem: Natively integrates mainstream LLMs, vector stores from diverse providers, and tools or prompts hosted on MCP servers into your agents, while enabling customizable extensions.
  • Observability: Adopts an event-centric orchestration approach, where all agent actions are connected and controlled by events, enabling observation and understanding of agent behavior through the event log.

Getting Started #

To get started with Apache Flink Agents, you can checkout the following quickstarts: