Today's guest is a legend in the distributed systems community. Stephan Ewan was one of the creators of Apache Flink, a stream processing engine that took off with the rise of Apache Kafka. Stephan is now working on core transactional problems by building a durable async/await system that integrates with any programming language. It's designed to help with a number of difficult problems in transactional processing, including idempotency, dual writes, distributed locks, and even simple retries and cancellation. In this episode, we get into the details of how Restate works and what it does. We cover core use cases and how people are solving these problems today. Then, we dive into the core of the Restate engine to learn why they're building on a log-based system. Finally, we cover lessons learned from Stephan's time with Flink and what's next for Restate.