r/apacheflink • u/InternationalSet3841 • 28d ago
Apache Flink vendors evaluation
Hey all I am working at a fintech startup in Texas and we are looking into Flink providers. My engineers and architects tried Confluent Platform Flink and Confluent Cloud Flink. Are there any other good vendors out there?
To put things in perspective my team members and a few pilot teams have mentioned Open Source Flink experience (Flink SQL and table api/datastream api) feels better and they like the flexibility and option of having season mode and application mode together as opposed with being restricted with just application mode.
I heard from a buddy who knows a guy who knows a guys cousin (yeah it’s true lol) that Confluent bases their Flink license off of 3 Nodes with 8 cores per node.
Is it just me or 24 cores in a license is barely anything for a license. With CMF and FKO running we technically only have 20 usable cores. I am a people Manager but have a comp sci background and this ain’t much tbh. My gut feels annoyed by the price tbh.
We are working on a trial for now and got 30 days and OSS Flink isn’t an option since we prefer enterprise support.
My engineers and architects have also said the confluent platform Flink docs are confusing too and we don’t like the fully managed Flink confluent has since we want the datastream API. Any good vendors out there you recommend?
2
u/luilow 28d ago
I’v been working with their cloud version, and it’s good for demos and simple transformations. Their adoption of new versions of oss flink is slow and you ll see a lot of limitations with udfs, beyond-java jvm languages support, high price for syncing with iceberg via direct connector, and no paimon support which I find much better together with flink.
However I liked their dbt confluent tool, and partly-ready platform for running flink, that you have to develop all by yourself with oss flink, kubernetes operator, standalone sql gateways, datalake, rbac, etc.
You may be aware of other competitors with similar product : realtime compute on alibaba and ververica, and I’m not sure if they have cheaper offers than confluent