Creating distributed applications presents the challenge of ensuring resilience, reliability, and fault tolerance. Addressing non-functional concerns such as retries, state synchronization, and distributed coordination can be time-consuming. While event-driven models aim to simplify these issues, they often create new difficulties in debugging and operations.
Stephan Ewen, the founder of Restate, focuses on simplifying modern distributed applications. He also co-created Apache Flink, an open-source framework for unified stream-processing and batch-processing.
Stephan joins Sean Falconer to discuss distributed applications and his work with Restate. Sean, an academic, startup founder, and former Googler, has published work on AI and quantum computing. As an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent, he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
[View the transcript of this episode.](http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/SED1814-Restate.txt)