Is it possible for flink to receive data from a broker, that is running on another docker image? I want to connect my redpanda instance with flink, but it can't get it on localhost and or otherwise. I need the distribution in the same docker image which is frustrating, as i need to connect mutliple programs to it

Yes- see this repo for an example set-up with redpanda and flink via docker-compose: https://github.com/polyzos/stream-processing-with-apache-flink