tco Archives - Kai Waehner

Shift Left Architecture at Siemens with Stream Processing using Apache Kafka and Flink

1.1K views
6 minute read

Shift Left Architecture at Siemens: Real-Time Innovation in Manufacturing and Logistics with Data Streaming

ByKai Waehner
11. April 2025

Industrial enterprises face increasing pressure to move faster, automate more, and adapt to constant change—without compromising reliability. Siemens Digital Industries addresses this challenge by combining real-time data streaming, modular design, and Shift Left principles to modernize manufacturing and logistics. This blog outlines how technologies like Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, and Confluent Cloud support scalable, event-driven architectures. A real-world example from Siemens’ Modular Intralogistics Platform illustrates how this approach improves data quality, system responsiveness, and operational agility.

ByKai Waehner
19. December 2012

I have spotted a really great article about comparing prices of open source and proprietary products: “What is the TCO difference between WebSphere and JBoss?”. The interesting aspect is, that this article is written by an IBM-biased company (Prolifics). Usually, only open source vendors write such comparisons. I really like this article, seriously! It is good to see comparisons not only by open source vendors, but also by vendors such as IBM (in this case, Prolifics cannot be considered unbiased, it is an IBM consulting company – but that is fine). I just want to give my two cents to this article in the following…