When one of the co-creators of the popular open source stream processing framework Apache Flink launches a recent startup, it’s value being attentive. Stephan Ewen he was one of the founders of the open source project in 2010 and later became the CTO of Data Artisans, a company that aimed to monetize Flink. Alibaba then acquired the company in 2019 and renamed it Ververica, and Ewen spent the requisite three years at the company before launching the workflow-as-code startup Rephrasealong with those responsible for Flink and former Data Artisan/Ververica collaborators Igal Shilman AND Until Rohrmann.
Restate, which says its overall mission is to make it easier to build distributed applications, today announced that it has raised a $7 million seed funding round, launching version 1.0 of its open source BSL license and launching a managed cloud service.
The promise of Restate is that it is so fast and lightweight that it would enable developers to make use of it where traditional workflow systems could be too slow and resource-intensive. This is supported by a persistent execution engine that may configure fault-tolerant communication between services and processes and that integrates with function-as-a-service platforms akin to AWS Lambda and Cloudflare Workers. While it is ideal for a microservices architecture, developers may also use it for task queues, event processing, or service orchestration in systems akin to inventory management or reservations.
However, it is value noting that Restate is not the first to make use of this idea. Open source platform Timefor example, it offers a somewhat similar feature set, although the Restate team would probably argue that its system is faster and lighter.
Ewen said that after 13 years at Flink, it was time to tackle a recent problem. “When we were working on Flink, different use cases kept coming up where people were sort of using Flink for transactional orchestration-style applications,” he told me. “And it wasn’t great when they used it for that, but they told us they didn’t find anything else.”
After seeing users do this over and once more, the team decided that if they were going to build one other company, they’d think about how they might solve this problem in a more elegant way.
Virtually every modern application consists of chains of workflows supported by a distributed set of services that must communicate reliably with each other. It takes a very experienced team to build such a fault-tolerant distributed system – many firms are building their very own – but it is also a matter of stakes, not something that can necessarily help these firms stand out in the market.
Ewen told me that the way they looked at it, the team took some of the ideas around stream processing from Flink and then combined them with the concept of workflows as code and a specialized event log — because the foundation of any workflow engine is a log . “Restate takes the idea of workflow as code and adds some other ideas inspired by stream processing. We transformed it into a more general-purpose distributed programming model based on persistent execution, virtual objects, and persistent promises – and built it on an event-driven foundation,” Ewen said.
The engine that powers it is very small and light and, as Ewen identified, fast — in part because it comes as a single binary chip. He believes that it will make the service useful in situations where a workflow mechanism is not traditionally used – for example, in the case of shopping carts in e-commerce. A lightweight workflow engine with built-in guarantees, persistent execution, and retries if something goes flawed ensures that items in an abandoned cart are released back to other customers after a specified time period, for example, minimizing the risk of something going flawed. process.
“[Restate] or classic workflows code things on an extremely lightweight foundation – and go a little further than simply standard workflow use cases. It includes communication and state management as a core concept, so you’ll be able to really use it to build things that do not lend themselves to workflows, but still fit thoroughly if you ought to build a proper microservices architecture,” Ewen explained.
The company also launched early access to hosted Restate Cloud today. For now, it’s available for free, and Ewen openly admitted that the team is still attempting to determine how people will use it before deciding on tips on how to monetize the service.
The company’s financing round was led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from Essence VC, First Minute capital and angels akin to Datadog founder Oli Pomel and Apache Kafka and Confluent founders Jay Kreps and Neha Narkhede. The company will use the funds to rent and expand infrastructure, in addition to to make the SDK available in more languages (currently supports TypeScript, Java and Kotlin).
“Ensuring the correctness, resilience and scalability of distributed transaction applications continues to be a challenge,” Kreps said. “Restate’s approach of combining persistent execution and event-driven architecture is a big step toward fixing this problem.”