Today I accidentally found out that one of the most important open source projects that literally boosted my career is now deprecated. This is about Lightbend Cloudflow.
Cloudflow enables users to quickly develop, orchestrate, and operate distributed streaming applications on Kubernetes. Cloudflow allows you to easily break down your streaming application to smaller composable components and wire them together with schema-based contracts. It also comes with a powerful CLI tool to easily manage, scale and configure your streaming applications at runtime. With its powerful abstractions, Cloudflow allows to define, build and deploy the most complex streaming applications.
We extensively used this framework in one of the largest projects in which I’ve ever participated — a credit bureau’s streaming data platform.
It was a challenging period; we made mistakes, corrected mistakes, made assumptions, and wrote a lot of code. That was also the start of my long-term friendship with Apache Flink.
Cloudflow wasn’t flawless; it has a bunch of (sometimes quite severe) problems, but anyway, it utilized breakthrough ideas for that time.
I even made a couple of tiny contributions to this project:
I really appreciate Lightbend work on this project. I look forward to new ideas and projects in the future!