There are two elements to this: why you should use Flink instead of its immediate competitors, and why you should use Ververica’s solution instead of a different implementation of Flink (including your own). The second of these is the simpler to answer: Ververica is the foremost expert on Flink – its bona fides in this regard are substantial – and is an obvious choice if you want commercial support. At the same time, you will want that support, especially if you plan to implement Flink at an enterprise scale. Experience has shown that building a bespoke streaming solution out of one or more open-source projects is extremely complex, time-consuming, and expensive. In contrast, adopting a solution like Ververica is both far simpler, leaving you free to concern yourself with higher-level matters, and most likely more effective. Needless to say, we recommend the latter over the former.
The case for Flink itself is more subjective. It certainly has its benefits: performance and scalability, for instance, largely due to its highly distributed architecture. It also provides a series of APIs (and, consequently, connectors) that offer both flexibility and a wide range of connectivity. All this makes Flink very well suited for stream processing at a massive scale, as evidenced in its adoption by Alibaba (which liked it so much it bought the greatest contributor to it – Ververica), to name only one example among many. Moreover, in the coming months, Ververica plans to continue to embrace the cloud, and develop Flink into what it describes as the first truly cloud-native stream processor, with all the inherent advantages of the cloud (such as at-will, up- and down- scaling with high guarantees) baked into it at a fundamental level.
The Bottom Line
Ververica provides substantial enterprise capability and commercial support for a very capable stream processing engine (namely, Apache Flink). At the end of the day, there are two questions worth asking in regards to its offering: do you want to use Flink? And, if so, do you want to use Ververica? We think that the answer to the former may well be yes; the answer to the latter almost certainly is.
