Hi Flink devs! I would like to propose the following FLIP - Eager State Declaration for Flink managed state: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-22%3A+Eager+State+Declaration. The proposal is a result of some offline discussions with Aljoscha Krettek, Stephan Ewen, and Stefan Richter.
With how the current managed state declaration interfaces work, users may declare state lazily while jobs are running. This behavior is a direct blocker for several state management features we wish to make a reality in the future. I also see it as an opportunity to make the interfaces for keyed / operator managed state declarations more unified at the API level, as well as improved user experience for general use cases. The most important part of the required changes is the deprecation of existing APIs and introducing new state declaration interfaces. Since this would be a rework of the state interfaces, it would be great to hear thoughts on this and make sure that the proposal is what we want in the long run! Happy to hear feedback on this :) Cheers, Gordon