Learn more about Apache Flink and Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics with three new videos

August 30, 2023: Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics has been renamed to Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink. Read the announcement in the AWS News Blog and learn more.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is a fully managed service for Apache Flink that reduces the complexity of building, managing, and integrating Apache Flink applications with other AWS services. Apache Flink is an open-source framework and engine for stateful processing of data streams. It’s highly available and scalable, delivering high throughput and low latency for the most demanding stream-processing applications.

In this post, we highlight three new videos for you to learn more about Apache Flink and Kinesis Data Analytics, including open-source contributions to Apache Flink, our learnings from running thousands of Flink jobs on a managed service, and how we use Kinesis Data Analytics and Apache Flink to enable machine learning (ML) in Alexa.

In Introducing the new Async Sink, we present the new Async Sink framework, an open-source contribution to make it easier than ever to build sink connectors for Apache Flink. You can learn about the need for the Async Sink framework and how we built it, followed by a demo of building a new sink to Amazon CloudWatch to deliver CloudWatch metrics, in under 20 minutes! The Async Sink framework bootstraps development of Flink sinks, is compatible with Apache Flink 1.15 and above, and has already seen usage by the community beyond building new sinks to AWS services.

The video Practical learnings from running thousands of Flink jobs shares insight from running Kinesis Data Analytics, a managed service for Apache Flink that runs tens of thousands of Flink jobs. You can learn lessons based on our experience of operating Apache Flink at very large scale, touching on issues such as out-of-memory errors, timeouts, and stability challenges. The video also covers improving application performance with memory tuning and configuration changes and the approaches to automating job health monitoring and management of Flink jobs at scale.

“Alexa, be quiet!” End-to-end near-real time model building and evaluation in Amazon Alexa discusses how Alexa has built an automated end-to-end solution for incremental model building or fine-tuning ML models through continuous learning, continual learning, or semi-supervised active learning. Alexa uses Apache Flink to transform and discover metrics in real time. In this video, you learn about how Alexa scales infrastructure to meet the needs of ML teams across Alexa, and explore specific use cases that use Apache Flink and Kinesis Data Analytics to improve Alexa experiences to delight customers.

To learn more about Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink, visit our product page.

About the author

Deepthi Mohan is a Principal Product Manager on the Kinesis Data Analytics team.