Hi everyone,
I would like to start a discussion on FLIP-582: Support RpcOperator Service [1]. AI-oriented workloads like multimodal data processing and model inference are growing rapidly in recent years. These workloads are characterized by expensive resources (GPUs) and high initialization costs (seconds to minutes for model loading). In today's Flink, embedding them in the data plane couples their parallelism and failover with surrounding operators; deploying them as external services disconnects their lifecycle from the job and doubles operational overhead. This FLIP introduces RpcOperator Service — a framework-level primitive that runs user-defined compute as RPC services in an independent Pipelined Region within the Flink job. Because the service is isolated at the scheduling level, it can achieve fault isolation, independent scaling, and dedicated resource allocation. As a native Flink primitive, it also lays the foundation for automatic flow control, flexible load balancing, and coordinated auto-scaling — all without introducing external infrastructure or additional operational burden. Looking forward to your feedback and suggestions! [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-582%3A+Support+RpcOperator+Service Best Regards, Yi Zhang
