_posts/2014-08-26-release-0.6.md

---
layout: post
title:  'Apache Flink 0.6 available'
date:   2014-08-26 10:00:00
categories: news
---

We are happy to announce the availability of Flink 0.6. This is the
first release of the system inside the Apache Incubator and under the
name Flink. Releases up to 0.5 were under the name Stratosphere, the
academic and open source project that Flink originates from.

## What is Flink?

Apache Flink is a general-purpose data processing engine for
clusters. It runs on YARN clusters on top of data stored in Hadoop, as
well as stand-alone. Flink currently has programming APIs in Java and
Scala. Jobs are executed via Flink's own runtime engine. Flink
features:

**Robust in-memory and out-of-core processing:** once read, data stays
  in memory as much as possible, and is gracefully de-staged to disk in
  the presence of memory pressure from limited memory or other
  applications. The runtime is designed to perform very well both in
  setups with abundant memory and in setups where memory is scarce.

**POJO-based APIs:** when programming, you do not have to pack your
  data into key-value pairs or some other framework-specific data
  model. Rather, you can use arbitrary Java and Scala types to model
  your data.

**Efficient iterative processing:** Flink contains explicit "iterate" operators
  that enable very efficient loops over data sets, e.g., for machine
  learning and graph applications.

**A modular system stack:** Flink is not a direct implementation of its
  APIs but a layered system. All programming APIs are translated to an
  intermediate program representation that is compiled and optimized
  via a cost-based optimizer. Lower-level layers of Flink also expose
  programming APIs for extending the system.

**Data pipelining/streaming:** Flink's runtime is designed as a
  pipelined data processing engine rather than a batch processing
  engine. Operators do not wait for their predecessors to finish in
  order to start processing data. This results to very efficient
  handling of large data sets.

## Release 0.6

Flink 0.6 builds on the latest Stratosphere 0.5 release. It includes
many bug fixes and improvements that make the system more stable and
robust, as well as breaking API changes.

The full release notes are available [here](https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=12315522&version=12327101).

Download the release [here](http://flink.incubator.apache.org/downloads.html).

## Contributors

* Wilson Cao
* Ufuk Celebi
* Stephan Ewen
* Jonathan Hasenburg
* Markus Holzemer
* Fabian Hueske
* Sebastian Kunert
* Vikhyat Korrapati
* Aljoscha Krettek
* Sebastian Kruse
* Raymond Liu
* Robert Metzger
* Mingliang Qi
* Till Rohrmann
* Henry Saputra
* Chesnay Schepler
* Kostas Tzoumas
* Robert Waury
* Timo Walther
* Daniel Warneke
* Tobias Wiens