Apache Flink
Apache Flink is an open-source, distributed stream processing framework designed for high-throughput, low-latency data processing. It provides a unified engine for both batch and stream processing, with built-in support for event time processing, state management, and exactly-once semantics. Flink is commonly used for real-time analytics, ETL pipelines, and complex event processing applications.
Developers should learn Apache Flink when building real-time data processing systems that require low-latency analytics, such as fraud detection, IoT sensor monitoring, or real-time recommendation engines. It's particularly valuable for use cases needing exactly-once processing guarantees, event time semantics, or stateful stream processing, making it a strong alternative to traditional batch-oriented frameworks like Hadoop MapReduce.