Flink Community update for March 2026

March 1, 2026 - David Radley

This is the monthly Flink Community update for March 2026. It covers the main developments in the community over the past month, including technical updates, user-facing updates, and governance and community.

Previous Blog: Flink community update February 2026

Developer/Technical Updates #

Key Themes #

  1. Additional Serviceability
  2. Improvements to watermarks
  3. Improved recovery with checkpoints
  4. Enhancements around splits
  5. Table planner enhancements

What happened last month #

  • Flink
    • All CI builds were failing; this was fixed in a PR that upgraded Kubernetes client libraries.
  • Flink JDBC connector
    • FLINK-38851 Support passing arbitrary database options to JDBC Catalog.
  • Flink Kafka connector had 14 commits going in. The most interesting were:
    • FLINK-39012 Support global enumerator/dispatcher for dynamic Kafka source (handling multiple cluster topologies)
    • FLINK-39120 Update to Kafka 4.2.0.

User-Facing Updates #

Kubernetes Operator 1.14.0 Release #

  • Announcement: Apache Flink Agents 0.2.0 released
  • Release Manager: Xintong Song
  • Key Features: Added Embedding Models, Vector Stores, MCP Server and Asynchronous Execution for JAVA.

Blogs #

Governance and Community #

FLIP Activity #

Accepted - being implemented #

FLIP-555: Flink Native S3 FileSystem. (Samrat Deb)

  • Offer native S3 filesystem (flink-s3-fs-native) for Apache Flink
  • Directly use AWS SDK V2 and is completely independent of Hadoop and Presto libraries.

Being discussed #

FLIP-566: Introduce a new IMMUTABLE columns constraint. (Xuyang Zhong)

  • Introduce a new IMMUTABLE columns constraint, which is useful for delta join, as join keys will be stable.
  • This means for a given primary key, the column values comprising the join key cannot be modified.

FLIP-564: Support FROM_CHANGELOG and TO_CHANGELOG built-in PTFs. (Gustavo de Morais)

  • Enables PTFs to declare that take in or produce CDC (Change Data Capture) information in change logs.
  • This is another datastream capability that is now present in the SQL world.
  • FROM_CHANGELOG: enables custom SQL connectors by handling custom Change Data Capture (CDC) formats.
  • TO_CHANGELOG: enables creating a CDC append stream from a Flink Table. This is the first operator that makes it possible to change an retract/upsert stream back to append.

FLIP-495: Support AdaptiveScheduler record and query the rescale history. (RocMarshal)

  • Allows rescale history to be recorded and queried.
  • This history allows the user to optimize future rescales based on historical behaviour.

FLIP-523: Handle TLS Certificate Renewal. (Oleksandr Nitavskyi)

  • Ability to reload TLS certificates when the underlying truststore and keystore are updated.
  • Aims to provide a solution for reloading TLS certificates in place, eliminating the need for system restarts.
  • Allows clusters to remain active using short lived TLS certificates.

You can view the dev list archives online or subscribe to receive emails.

Release planning for Flink 2.3 is ongoing.

For more information #

Follow this blog to keep up to date with what is happening in the Flink community.

If you have ideas for what you would like to see in these blogs or there is anything you think has been misrepresented, is wrong or missing, please let us know via the dev list (detail below) or Slack.

If you would like to keep a closer eye on what’s happening in the community, subscribe to one of the Flink community mailing lists to get fine-grained weekly updates, upcoming event announcements and more. Two popular mailing lists are:

  • the dev list for development related discussions
  • the user list for user support and questions

Want to contribute translation?

Edit This Page