A major challenge with creating distributed applications is achieving resilience, reliability, and fault tolerance.

It can take considerable engineering time to address non-functional concerns like retries, state synchronization, and distributed coordination.

Event-driven models aim to simplify these issues, but often introduce new difficulties in debugging and

operations. Stefan Ewan is the founder at Restate, which aims to simplify modern distributed

applications. He is also the co-creator of Apache Flink, which is an open-source framework for

unified stream processing and batch processing.

Stefan joins the show with Sean Falconer to talk about distributed applications and his work with Restate.

This episode is hosted by Sean Falconer.

Check the show notes for more information on Sean's work and where to find him.

Music him.

Stefan, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Hi, Sean.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for doing this.

I'm excited to get into it.

So I wanted to start off with a bit of your background.

You know, what was sort of your journey and experience from working on Flink to now being the CEO and founder of Restate?

Yeah. Most of my professional life was Apache Flink so far. As part of the team that started it in 2014, and in a way, probably I'm responsible for a lot of the early architecture of Apache Flink around, you know, the way the data

plane, the coordination, the snapshots, and all of that worked. The journey actually started

even earlier. In a way, it started when I was still at university in grad school and we were working in this sort of intersection between Hadoop and databases and some of the very, very early steps of stream processing had just come up.

You know, like Storm was a new thing back then.

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