Streaming Event-Time Partitioning With Apache Flink and Apache Iceberg - Julia Bennett

Netflix’s playback data records every user interaction with video on the service, from trailers on the home page to full-length movies. This is a critical dataset with high volume that is used broadly across Netflix, powering product experiences, AB test metrics, and offline insights. In processing playback data, we depend heavily on event-time partitioning to handle a long tail of late arriving events. In this talk, I’ll provide an overview of our recent implementation of generic event-time partitioning on high volume streams using Apache Flink and Apache Iceberg (Incubating). Built as configurable Flink components that leverage Iceberg as a new output table format, we are now able to write playback data and other large scale datasets directly from a stream into a table partitioned on event time, replacing the common pattern of relying on a post-processing batch job that “puts the data in the right place”. We’ll talk through what it took to apply this to our playback data in practice, as well as challenges we hit along the way and tradeoffs with a streaming approach to event-time partitioning.