Flink is centralized with all the fun that goes along with that:

https://www.confluent.io/blog/apache-flink-apache-kafka-streams-comparison-guideline-users/

To summarize, while the global coordination model is powerful for streaming jobs in Flink, it works less well for standalone applications and microservices that need to do stream processing: the application would have to participate in Flink’s checkpointing (implement some APIs) and would need to participate in the recovery of other failed shards by rolling back certain state changes to maintain consistency. That is clearly not as lightweight as the Streams API approach. Again, both approaches show their strength in different scenarios.