The creators of Flink were on a university research project when they decided to turn it into a full-fledged company. They founded data Artisans in 2014 as an attempt to build a large-scale data processing technology which is both open-source and rooted in long-tested principles and architectures. Flink is an open-source stream-processing framework now under the Apache Software Foundation. It is built around a distributed streaming dataflow engine which is written in Java and Scala, and executes arbitrary dataflow programs in a way that is parallel and pipelined.

Programs in Java, Scala, Python, and SQL automatically compile and optimize into dataflow programs which we then execute in a cluster or cloud environment.