Photo/Shetuwang

Jan. 14 (NBD) -- Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group has closed a 90-million-euro (102.9-million-U.S. dollar) deal to acquire German technology start-up Data Artisans, which offers large-scale data streaming services for enterprises.

Kostas Tzoumas, one of the founders of the company, is also the creator of Apache Flink (Flink), a premium open source stream processing framework.

Flink enables enterprises to responde quickly to data change and thus make efficient decisions by executing bulk and stream processing programs for clients with its high-throughput, low-latency streaming engine.

Before the new acquisition, Alibaba has been using Flink technology for more than three years. The Group has built Apache Flink-based system Blink through which the performance and stability of Flink is upgraded and the core structure and functions are improved.

Currently, the system is operating on over 10,000 servers for Alibaba and processing up to 472 million visits per second.

The platform is applied in core businesses of the company such as advertising and searching, and supports mass processing during Double Eleven Shopping Festival.

Since April last year when Blink-based AlibabaCloud Computing service was commercialized, it has been serving more than 2,000 users for real-time Internet data analysis, real-time data display, real-time financial risk control and other applications.

Zhou Jingren, vice president of Alibaba Group, believes the strategic tie-in will further strengthen the growth of the Flink community, accelerate the data-processing technologies and help bolster an open, collaborative and constructive environment for global developers.

With emergence of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) and maturity of 5G technology, the instant data analysis is required in various fields, from online shopping and ride hailing to highway monitoring, advanced driver-assistance systems and advertising push.

As one of Flink's core users, Netflix demands advanced data extraction pipeline and stream processing engine because 12 petabytes of data and 3 trillion routines need to be handled.

Flink's streaming dataflow engine provides data distribution, data communication, fault-tolerant system and other services for to support distributed dataflow processing.

In China, Tencent, Huawei, Didi Chuixing, Meituan Dianping, ByteDance and other Internet giants have begun adopting stream processing and Flink is their prime choice of processing engine.

As the open source platforms are high valued by enterprises emphasizing on big data, AI and cloud computing, purchasing firms with unique open source technology and resources has become a trend for tech titans.

Microsoft completed takeover of leading open-source software development platform GitHub last October, followed by IBM snapping up open source stalwart Red Hat for 33.4 billion U.S. dollars.

Though Flink stands out in the stream processing market, it still has a number of rivals. According to Newstack.com, open source frameworks for dataflow processing include Google's Apache Beam, Intel's Apache Gearpump and IBM's Apache Edgent. In addition, LinkedIn's Apache Samza also has its own unique strengths.

Email: zhanglingxiao@nbd.com.cn