Hi everyone, I was delighted to attend Fink Forward again this year in Barcelona! Every edition I am blown away by what the organizers at Ververica are doing to advance the real-time AI landscape and the value they continue to deliver to their customers.

I joined for the 2-day conference, while some attendees also participated in the hands-on Apache Flink® training that took place earlier in the week. This year’s program was packed with insights and breakthrough projects, including:

• The power to leverage your data on your own terms and act in the now with Ververica Platform 3.0! With this release, there’s no longer a tradeoff between streaming and batch.

• A leap forward in performance with VERA-X - the best native vectorized processing engine yet. Unmatched efficiency and speed, backed by breakthrough NexMark results.

• The introduction of Flink Agents (FLIP-531) - an open-source sub-project of Apache Flink that embeds intelligent AI systems directly into business data flows. Allowing business operations to take intelligent actions automatically, without explicit prompts.

• Another leap in next-generation streaming-first storage with Apache Fluss. With the unveiling of the latest release, Fluss continues to expand its community and is now integrated within Ververica’s Unified Streaming Data Platform.

What’s even more exciting is that all the conference sessions were recorded and are now free to view on Ververica Academy. I’ve included a few of my favorite sessions that I especially enjoyed.

I also had the opportunity to speak with many of the presenters and industry leaders shaping the future of real-time AI, including engineers from companies like Sony PlayStation. You can check out all my exclusive interviews for deeper insights.

For more behind-the-scenes perspectives, be sure to listen and subscribe to the official podcast “Behind the Stream,” where the folks at Flink Forward explore the people and technologies defining the next chapter of real-time AI and streaming data.

Flink Forward Barcelona 2025 didn’t just showcase what’s new - it inspired and fostered a community to share knowledge and insights. To me, it felt like a roadmap for where Ververica are taking Flink, and shaping the wider real-time AI landscape.

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Best,

Ravit Jain

Founder & Host of The Ravit Show