At Flink Forward Asia 2026, Alibaba Cloud shared plans to push Apache Flink towards “agentic streaming”, driven by the rise of agents and multimodal data in the agentic AI era. Apache Flink is a widely used open-source real-time data framework under the Apache Software Foundation.
The upcoming Apache Flink 3.0 marks a major shift from cloud-native to AI-native, feeding live data directly into AI agents so they can respond instantly.
To support this, Alibaba Cloud shared updates on the new open-source data storage projects and a collaboration with NVIDIA. These initiatives are designed to help developers build AI-native applications using real-time, multimodal data pipelines.
As a long-term contributor and organizer of the Flink Forward Asia events, Alibaba Cloud has played a pivotal role in advancing the Apache Flink community, particularly in Asia. During the event, the company also announced major upgrades for its Flink-based cloud products to meet enterprises’ demand for massive, real-time multimodal data during the event.
Feng Wang, Head of Open Data Platform at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, delivered a keynote speech at Apache Flink Asia 2026
Flink Forward Asia is the official conference for the Apache Flink community. The 2026 event kicked off in Shenzhen on Friday, building on previous conferences in Asian cities like Jakarta and Singapore that have collectively attracted tens of thousands of developers.
As AI applications move from text-centric to multimodal, the real-time processing capability of unstructured data such as video, images and audio has become a new technical frontier. Processing these different data types in real time is challenging because it requires low latency, aligned streams and heavy memory. Flink’s streaming pipeline can handle every data type and run CPU and GPU tasks together in a unified workflow, making it a natural fit for AI workloads.
During the summit, Alibaba Cloud officially launched a new multimodal data processing capability for its Realtime Compute for Apache Flink, its enterprise-grade serverless service. The new feature handles text, images, audio, video and sensor signals within a unified streaming framework. It outperforms mainstream open-source alternatives in speed, data handling convenience, real-time updates, the number of supported data sources and overall system reliability. The fully managed service serves more than 10,000 businesses, including leading Chinese automakers Li Auto, Geely and Leapmotor.
During a speech at the event, Chuan Chen, Senior Director of Internet Solutions Architecture at NVIDIA, shared a deep dive into how NVIDIA and Alibaba Cloud work together to accelerate the multimodal data stream processing for Apache Flink. Through the open-source ecosystem collaboration, users can rapidly build end-to-end, high-performance, scalable multimodal real-time streaming architectures, powering real-world applications like AI commentary, live image-text feeds, and interactive Q&A.
As AI agents become more common, Alibaba Cloud is addressing how they access and use data. Its agentic lake is a unified data-storage system designed for AI agents, built on two upcoming open-source projects: Apache Paimon 2.0 and Apache Fluss (incubating) 1.0. The goal is to keep one set of data that can power analytics, AI training and real-time agent memory at the same time.
Alibaba Cloud is already bringing this concept to life through Data Lake Formation (DLF), a new product that provides foundation for big data, search engines and AI applications. DLF improves general query performance by two to six times.
The Apache Flink community is also developing Flink Agents, a framework designed to support always-on AI agents since 2025. It treats every agent interaction as a streaming event, giving agents real-time processing, persistent memory and round-the-clock fault tolerance. Potential uses include live-stream analytics, financial risk control and automated business operations.
This article was originally published on Alizila written by Karen Zhang.
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