Hi, I'm David Anderson with Confluent, here to tell you all about Apache Flink. We'll look together at why Flink is interesting, and how you can use it to build real-time data products. Along the way, I'll explain the big ideas on which Flink is based, and show you around under the hood so you'll understand how Flink works. Apache Flink is a battle-hardened stream processor widely used for demanding real-time applications. Its performance and robustness are the result of a handful of core design principles, including a share-nothing architecture featuring local state, event-time processing, and state snapshots for recovery. Through a combination of videos and hands-on exercises, this course brings these core principles to life. The focus of this course is going to be on the 4 Big Ideas that form the foundation for Apache Flink, which are streaming, state, time, and the use of state snapshots for fault tolerance and failure recovery. Understanding how Flink's runtime is organized around these four concepts, and how they are interrelated, is the key that unlocks Apache Flink. In the first four sections, we'll look together at streams and stream processing, and do so from several different perspectives. In the second half, we will look at each of the other three big ideas. By the end of the course you'll know enough to be able to implement some common use cases, and you'll understand what's going on inside of Flink when it is running your applications. Most of the modules in this course have a hands-on exercise that reinforces and expands upon the information in these videos. You'll find these exercises and other materials for this course on developer.confluent.io. These hands-on exercises all use Flink SQL. The focus will always be on learning about the concepts and architecture of Flink, while taking advantage of the SQL that you already know. And don't worry, you're not expected to be a SQL expert for this course. We're not going to do anything more complicated than aggregating data with GROUP BY. In several of the hands-on exercises, you will be using Flink SQL together with Apache Kafka to produce and consume data on Confluent Cloud. If you haven't already signed up for Confluent Cloud, sign up now so when you need it for the exercises, you'll be ready. And be sure to use the promo code in the description: it provides enough free credit to do all of the exercises for this course.