<p>Flink 1.15 has a new <a href="https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-docs-master/docs/ops/state/savepoints/#savepoint-format" rel="nofollow noreferrer">native savepoint format</a> that is faster to save and restore than the current &quot;canonical&quot; savepoint format. However, the Flink docs only show how to write a native savepoint using the command line. We are running Flink on K8s, currently using the <a href="https://github.com/lyft/flinkk8soperator" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Lyft Flink operator</a> but looking to switch to the new <a href="https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-kubernetes-operator-docs-main/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Apache Flink operator</a>.</p>
<p>This operator can <a href="https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-kubernetes-operator-docs-main/docs/custom-resource/job-management/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">write savepoints</a> periodically, on deployment, or when a nonce is written to the ConfigMap. We want to take advantage of this. Is there any way to configure the Apache Flink operator to write native savepoints?</p>

Brianna Greenberg
<p>The operator currently always uses the default (canonical) format when taking savepoints (upgrades, manual/periodic savepoints).</p>
<p>There is no inherent limitation why it does this, but we just hardcoded it to the default when added Flink 1.15 support recently. Most of the related code is in the FlinkService, for example <a href="https://github.com/apache/flink-kubernetes-operator/blob/main/flink-kubernetes-operator/src/main/java/org/apache/flink/kubernetes/operator/service/AbstractFlinkService.java#L447" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>.</p>
<p>I think we should make expose this as a simple config option that users can set through the <code>flinkConfiguration</code>.</p>
<p>Opened a <a href="https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-28763" rel="nofollow noreferrer">jira ticket</a> for this. Let me know if you want to pick it up, should be very easy :)</p>
