[FLINK-13730] Cache and share the downloaded external distribution (e.g. Kafka) in E2E tests

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Duplicate
• Component/s: Connectors / Kafka, Tests
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Jark Wu
• Created: 15/Aug/19 02:22
• Updated: 15/Aug/19 10:04
• Resolved: 15/Aug/19 10:04

Description

We can try to cache and share the downloaded Kafka distribution among multiple e2e test runs.
There is a PR by Chesnay Schepler (https://github.com/apache/flink/pull/7605) which conceptually does it.

This will help to reduce a lot of e2e testing time. And it would be very help for Chinese developers to verify e2e locally, because it's very unstable and almost impossible to download them in China.

We can do the same thing for other external distributions, for example, elasticsearch.

Issue Links

• is duplicated by: FLINK-11463 Rework end-to-end tests in Java