Authors: Kostas Tzoumas and Stephan Ewen

We are excited about data Artisans joining forces with Alibaba, to build a new initiative around Big Data open source technologies, following a Series B financing round earlier last year.

Let us highlight the reasons why we are thrilled about this move and the exciting future that lies ahead of us, our customers, partners and the Apache Flink and broader Big Data open source community.

Since data Artisans was founded in 2014, we have always been believers in the potential of open source technologies for developers and enterprises. That’s why we started Apache Flink as an open source framework for efficient, yet user-friendly data processing at massive scale. Fast forward to January 2019 and Flink is one of the fastest growing communities in the Apache Software Foundation, with hundreds of contributors and astonishing adoption by some of the largest companies in the world from multiple industries and geographies.

Especially at times when many open source technologies and companies decide on a less collaborative and more “closed” approach, it is with great pleasure to see Alibaba committed to open source and our mission, eager to take Flink’s technological advancement to the next level. Alibaba, as one of the largest production users and biggest contributors to Apache Flink, in close collaboration with the open source community and data Artisans team, has made numerous contributions to the Flink codebase over the last 2 years.

Moving forward together, data Artisans and Alibaba will not only continue, but accelerate contributions to Apache Flink and open source Big Data. As a first step, Alibaba announced their commitment to contribute their in-house developments around Flink — Blink — to the open source community.

Our customers and partners can expect the same unparalleled level of service, contribution and commitment to open source, ingrained technological advancement, and innovation, as well as a smooth continuation of our enterprise offerings with the same professionalism — just at an accelerated pace! Together with Alibaba, we can enhance our efforts and technology to new horizons by investing even more to open source. We can expand to new areas that we have not explored in the past and make sure that Flink becomes a more valuable data processing framework for the modern data-driven, real-time enterprise.

Last but not least: a massive THANK YOU! Thank you to the Apache Flink community, to the committers and contributors that maintain a world-class open source technology, to our customers and early adopters for believing in our technology and what we are capable of. Finally, a big thank you to the data Artisans team for being a true family, pushing forward the boundaries to everything we have done and accomplished so far. We are extremely proud of the impact each and everyone has made.

Our true North Star has been and will always be building innovative open source technologies to enhance lives for the better! This remains unchanged as we move to our next chapter.

Read what Alibaba says here.