Data Streaming & Data-Intensive Applications

Pivoting to Consulting & Training

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0700

I stopped any active development on Irontools a few months ago. I spend most of my time on consulting and training at the moment, so I decided to acknowledge that publicly. However, I’d also like to open-source my Irontools extensions in the future. You can read more details here.

Introducing Iron Vector: Apache Flink Accelerator Capable of Reducing Compute Cost by up to 2x

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0700

Iron Vector is a native, columnar, vectorized, high-performance accelerator for Apache Flink SQL and Table API pipelines.

It’s easy to install, requires no code changes, and can increase compute efficiency by up to 2x (as of now).

Iron Vector

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 20:00:00 -0700

Documentation is still in progress.

Please check the product page in the meantime: Iron Vector.

Polyglot Apache Flink UDF Programming with Iron Functions

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0700

Stream-processing technologies have been evolving over the years. The latest iteration borrows many ideas from databases; as a result, streaming SQL has become one of the primary interfaces for data processing.

Apache Flink SQL is an extremely powerful way to define data streaming pipelines. Flink SQL is declarative, supports changelog semantics, and relies on decades of database optimization research.

However, sometimes SQL is just not enough (or too hard!). You may need to work with deeply nested data structures, and writing JSON parsing logic in SQL is still quite challenging. Or you may have certain battle-tested libraries you want to use (I’ve seen this many times). Finally, some engineers just prefer imperative languages they’re already comfortable using.

User-Defined Functions (UDFs) are typically used as a workaround in this case. You author a piece of logic in Java, package it, register with your SQL environment… that’s it! You found a way to bring imperative logic to the declarative world 🙂.

The Iron Functions extension enables you to take it even further.

Announcing Irontools

Tue, 06 May 2025 20:00:00 -0700

Hello world, everyone! 👋 Today, I’m excited to introduce Irontools - a suite of Apache Flink® extensions that makes your Flink pipelines more efficient and unlocks new use cases.

Changelog

Tue, 06 May 2025 20:00:00 -0700

Iron Serde

0.9.7

Bugfix for IronAvroRowDataDeserializationSchema.

0.9.6

Added IronAvroRowDataDeserializationSchema and iron-avro-confluent deserialization format.

0.9.5

First official release.

Iron Functions

0.9.8

Updated WebAssembly runtime.

0.9.7

First official release.

Getting Started

Tue, 06 May 2025 20:00:00 -0700

Overview

Start with a few simple steps:

Configure your Flink project to use the Irontools repository.
Configure Irontools license.
Check Iron Serde or Iron Functions sections to learn how to use them in your Flink applications.

Repository Setup

You can find the latest versions of Irontools projects in the Changelog page.

Maven

Add repository configuration to your pom.xml:

<repositories>
  <repository>
    <id>irontools-repo</id>
    <url>https://repo.irontools.dev/releases</url>
  </repository>
</repositories>

Add dependencies to your pom.xml:

Iron Serde:

<dependency>
    <groupId>dev.irontools</groupId>
    <artifactId>iron-serde</artifactId>
    <version>${irontools.version}</version>
</dependency>

Iron Functions:

Iron Functions

Tue, 06 May 2025 20:00:00 -0700

Iron Functions enables WebAssembly-based function execution in Apache Flink, allowing you to author code in languages that are typically not supported: TypeScript, Rust, Go.

It leverages WebAssembly and the Extism ecosystem to provide a secure, high-performance environment for executing custom functions. This approach offers several advantages:

Security: WebAssembly provides a sandboxed execution environment, so you can run even untrusted code safely.
Performance: Fast execution speed with runtime compilation.
Language Flexibility: Write functions in several supported languages.
Integration: Seamless integration with both DataStream and Table/SQL APIs.

Because of the secure sandboxed environment, WebAssembly functions have some limitations: they can’t read files, they don’t support multithreading, and they can’t make arbitrarily network calls. Network calls are possible using the provided HTTP client in each language. Consult the Languages section for more details.

Iron Serde

Tue, 06 May 2025 20:00:00 -0700

Iron Serde provides high-performance Kafka serialization and deserialization libraries for Apache Flink. These libraries don’t require any additional configuration and can be used as drop-in replacements for the default Flink libraries.

When a new schema (either provided by a Schema Registry or inferred from a class) is observed, Iron Serde generates a specialized class that’s used only for deserializing that specific schema. The class is very compact, has minimal branching, and is quickly JIT compiled.

Pricing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Pricing

Free Trial

Access to all extensions
Unlimited Apache Flink® jobs
Best effort support

Enjoy 30 day free trial Get free trial

Developer

Access to all extensions
Unlimited Apache Flink® jobs
Best effort support

Contact to get a quote

Enterprise

Access to all extensions
Unlimited Apache Flink® jobs
Custom extensions and optimizations
Integration assistance
Standard support

Contact to get a quote

Annual and semi-annual licenses are available.

Products

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Iron Vector

Native, columnar, vectorized, high-performance accelerator for Apache Flink SQL and Table API built with Rust, Arrow and DataFusion. Read more

Higher throughput without scaling up

Or significant cost savings, your choice

Thanks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000