# Realtime Compute for Apache Flink

Staff Engineer, product experience · Alibaba Cloud · 2015 – 2023

![Realtime Compute for Apache Flink screenshot](https://www.yadongxie.com/projects/realtime-compute.webp)

Realtime Compute is Alibaba Cloud's fully managed, serverless Apache Flink — the same engine that carries the traffic behind Tmall's Double Eleven, sold as a service where a team writes SQL and never sees a cluster. I led the web engineering behind its product experience.

Streaming is unusually unforgiving as a product surface. A job is a long-running thing that can be healthy, slowly falling behind, or quietly wrong, and the difference between those three has to be visible before it turns into a page at 3am. So most of the design work sits around the lifecycle: what you see when a job is deployed, when it is scaled, when it is restarted from a checkpoint, and when it is losing ground against its source.

## Links

- [Realtime Compute for Apache Flink](https://www.alibabacloud.com/en/product/realtime-compute)
- [flink.apache.org](https://flink.apache.org/)