Apache Spark 4.0.0 is the first release in the 4.x series, showcasing significant community collaboration with over 5100 resolved tickets. Major enhancements include a new lightweight Python client, expanded features in Spark SQL and PySpark, and improved structured streaming capabilities, alongside numerous other updates for better performance and usability.

Apache Flink has announced the preview release of Apache Flink Agents 0.1.0, a new sub-project designed to integrate event-driven AI agents with Flink's streaming runtime. This framework aims to enhance real-time processing of high-volume event streams, ensuring reliability and scalability while providing first-class abstractions for agent functionalities such as large language models and dynamic orchestration.