How Agentic Streaming Is Redefining Real‑Time AI at Flink Forward Asia 2026

On June 26, the Apache Software Foundation officially authorized the Alibaba Cloud‑hosted Flink Forward Asia (FFA) 2026 event in Shenzhen, themed “Real‑time Data, Intelligent Future,” gathering developers, data engineers, AI practitioners, and industry leaders.

Flink Evolution and AI Context

Alibaba Cloud CTO Li Feifei opened the forum by tracing Flink’s growth from a stream‑processing engine to the Cloud‑Native Flink 2.0 and now the Agent‑Native Flink 3.0, noting that AI’s rise makes data quality and efficiency critical. The speaker emphasized that successful AI agents depend not only on model capability but also on robust data pipelines, positioning Agentic Streaming for AI as the natural next step.

Pipeline Architecture and Performance Claims

The article explains that AI workloads require tight CPU‑GPU coordination on a single pipeline. Traditional stage‑by‑stage batch architectures cause GPU idle time due to scheduling gaps and disk I/O, whereas Flink’s pipeline model enables full‑link parallel streaming and direct data‑network transmission, allowing CPU and GPU operators to be orchestrated together. The new Flink real‑time engine is claimed to outperform open‑source stacks such as Ray and Daft across throughput, operator richness, incremental processing, connector ecosystem, and fault‑tolerance.

Agentic Streaming Roadmap

Flink’s release of full‑modal data‑processing capabilities marks the start of Agentic Streaming. The roadmap includes Harness‑style technologies that will bring agents into a 24/7 streaming era, continuously sensing external events (transactions, logs, sensor signals), incrementally reasoning, and autonomously executing decisions. Since 2025, Flink Agents have been incubated to provide an Event‑Driven Agent framework with real‑time processing, context memory, Exactly‑Once consistency, and high‑availability, targeting use cases such as live‑stream analysis, video commentary, financial risk control, intelligent operations, and public‑opinion monitoring.

Agentic Lake and Apache Paimon 2.0

To meet multimodal data demands, the community has combined Apache Paimon and Apache Fluss on Alibaba Cloud to build the Agentic Lake, a unified multimodal data foundation for big data, search, and AI. Paimon 2.0 extends the real‑time offline integration of version 1.0 with a multimodal structured‑one‑size‑fits‑all lake, offering Git‑for‑Table, global vector‑full‑text indexing, REST and CLI interfaces, and seamless storage of structured and unstructured data for large‑model training and inference.

Apache Fluss 1.0 – Real‑Time Context for AI Agents

Fluss 1.0, soon to be GA, aims to become the real‑time context layer for agents. It unifies streaming and historical data via Lakestream, provides low‑latency Context Serving, builds a governed semantic view, and exposes an MCP Gateway for native agent integration. These capabilities support real‑time risk control, marketing decisions, and operational scheduling.

Production Benchmarks

Taobao Flash Sale deployments of Fluss achieved a 67% reduction in network I/O and a 50% drop in R&D‑ops cost at a 1.4 PB storage scale. Xiaohongshu’s migration from Kafka to Fluss, using Arrow writes and columnar reads, lowered CPU usage by 30%, cut write traffic by 50%, saved 30‑90% bandwidth on the online side, and increased peak throughput by roughly threefold.

NVIDIA Collaboration

NVIDIA’s VideoCodec, nvImageCodec, CV‑CUDA, TensorRT LLM, vLLM, and SGLang libraries are being co‑engineered with Flink to accelerate video, image, and multimodal processing. Combined with Flink’s streaming orchestration, GPU scheduling, and Flink Agents, this partnership enables end‑to‑end high‑performance multimodal pipelines for AI commentary, image‑text news, and interactive Q&A.

Closing Outlook

FFA 2026, co‑hosted by Alibaba Cloud and Ververica with NVIDIA as the sole diamond partner, runs free for developers through June 27. The conference will continue tracking progress on Flink, Paimon, Fluss, Flink Agents, and Flink CDC, inviting the global community to push Agentic Streaming and Agentic Lake forward.