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The Data Streaming Landscape 2025

Data streaming is a new software category. It has grown from niche adoption to becoming a fundamental part of modern data architecture, leveraging open source technologies like Apache Kafka and Flink. With real-time data processing transforming industries, the ecosystem of tools, platforms, and cloud services has evolved significantly. This blog post explores the data streaming landscape of 2025, analyzing key players, trends, and market dynamics shaping this space.
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Multi-Cloud Replication in Real-Time with Apache Kafka and Cluster Linking
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Multi-Cloud Replication in Real-Time with Apache Kafka and Cluster Linking

Multiple Apache Kafka clusters are the norm; not an exception anymore. Hybrid integration and multi-cloud replication for migration or disaster recovery are common use cases. This blog post explores a real-world success story from financial services around the transition of a large traditional bank from on-premise data centers into the public cloud for multi-cloud data sharing between AWS and Azure.
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Apache Iceberg Open Table Format for Data Lake Lakehouse Streaming wtih Kafka Flink Databricks Snowflake AWS GCP Azure
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Apache Iceberg – The Open Table Format for Lakehouse AND Data Streaming

An open table format framework like Apache Iceberg is essential in the enterprise architecture to ensure reliable data management and sharing, seamless schema evolution, efficient handling of large-scale datasets and cost-efficient storage. This blog post explores market trends, adoption of table format frameworks like Iceberg, Hudi, Paimon, Delta Lake and XTable, and the product strategy of leading vendors of data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks (Apache Spark), Confluent (Apache Kafka / Flink), Amazon Athena and Google BigQuery.
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Google Apache Kafka for BigQuery GCP Cloud Service
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When (Not) to Choose Google Managed Service for Apache Kafka?

Google announced its Apache Kafka for BigQuery cloud service at its conference Google Cloud Next 2024 in Las Vegas. Welcome to the data streaming club joining Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Confluent, and others. This blog post explores this new managed Kafka offering for GCP, reviews the current status of the data streaming landscape, and shares some criteria to evaluate when Kafka in general and Google Apache Kafka in particular should (not) be used.
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Tiered Storage for Apache Kafka - Use Cases Architecture Benefits.png
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Why Tiered Storage for Apache Kafka is a BIG THING…

Apache Kafka added Tiered Storage to separate compute and storage. The capability enables more scalable, reliable and cost-efficient enterprise architectures. This blog post explores the architecture, use cases, benefits, and a case study for storing Petabytes of data in the Kafka commit log. The end discusses why Tiered Storage does NOT replace other databases and how Apache Iceberg might change future Kafka architectures even more.
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The State of Data Streaming for Digital Natives in 2023
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The State of Data Streaming for Digital Natives in 2023

This blog post explores the state of data streaming in 2023 for digital natives born in the cloud. Data streaming allows integrating and correlating data in real-time at any scale to improve the most innovative applications leveraging Apache Kafka. I explore how data streaming helps as a business enabler, including customer stories from New Relic, Wix, Expedia, Apna, Grab, and more. A complete slide deck and on-demand video recording are included.
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Data Streaming Landscape 2023 with Apache Kafka Flink and much more
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The Data Streaming Landscape 2023

Data streaming is a new software category to process data in motion. Apache Kafka is the de facto standard used by over 100,000 organizations. Plenty of vendors offer Kafka platforms and cloud services. Many complementary stream processing engines like Apache Flink and SaaS offerings have emerged. And competitive technologies like Pulsar and Redpanda try to get market share. This blog post explores the data streaming landscape of 2023 to summarize existing solutions and market trends.
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The Heart of the Data Mesh Beats Real Time with Apache Kafka
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The Heart of the Data Mesh Beats Real-Time with Apache Kafka

If there were a buzzword of the hour, it would undoubtedly be “data mesh”! This new architectural paradigm unlocks analytic and transactional data at scale and enables rapid access to an ever-growing number of distributed domain datasets for various usage scenarios. The data mesh addresses the most common weaknesses of the traditional centralized data lake or data platform architecture. And the heart of a decentralized data mesh infrastructure must be real-time, reliable, and scalable. Learn how the de facto standard for data streaming, Apache Kafka, plays a crucial role in building a data mesh.
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Stream Exchange for Data Sharing with Apache Kafka in a Data Mesh
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Streaming Data Exchange with Kafka and a Data Mesh in Motion

Data Mesh is a new architecture paradigm that gets a lot of buzzes these days. This blog post looks into this principle deeper to explore why no single technology is the perfect fit to build a  Data Mesh. Examples show why an open and scalable decentralized real-time platform like Apache Kafka is often the heart of the Data Mesh infrastructure, complemented by many other data platforms to solve business problems.
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Serverless Kafka for Data in Motion as Rescue for Data at Rest in the Data Lake
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Serverless Kafka in a Cloud-native Data Lake Architecture

Apache Kafka became the de facto standard for processing data in motion. Kafka is open, flexible, and scalable. Unfortunately, the latter makes operations a challenge for many teams. Ideally, teams can use a serverless Kafka SaaS offering to focus on business logic. However, hybrid scenarios require a cloud-native platform that provides automated and elastic tooling to reduce the operations burden. This blog post explores how to leverage cloud-native and serverless Kafka offerings in a hybrid cloud architecture. We start from the perspective of data at rest with a data lake and explore its relation to data in motion with Kafka.
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