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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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Data Streaming Trends for 2025 - Leading with Apache Kafka and Flink
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Top Trends for Data Streaming with Apache Kafka and Flink in 2025

Apache Kafka and Apache Flink are leading open-source frameworks for data streaming that serve as the foundation for cloud services, enabling organizations to unlock the potential of real-time data. Over recent years, trends have shifted from batch-based data processing to real-time analytics, scalable cloud-native architectures, and improved data governance powered by these technologies. Looking ahead to 2025, the data streaming ecosystem is set to undergo even greater changes. Here are the top trends shaping the future of data streaming for businesses.
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Apache Kafka Deployment Options - Serverless vs Self-Managed vs BYOC Bring Your Own Cloud
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Deployment Options for Apache Kafka: Self-Managed, Fully-Managed / Serverless and BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud)

BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) is an emerging deployment model for organizations looking to maintain greater control over their cloud environments. Unlike traditional SaaS models, BYOC allows businesses to host applications within their own VPCs to provide enhanced data privacy, security, and compliance. This approach leverages existing cloud infrastructure. It offers more flexibility for custom configurations, particularly for companies with stringent security needs. In the data streaming sector around Apache Kafka, BYOC is changing how platforms are deployed. Organizations get more control and adaptability for various use cases. But it is clearly NOT the right choice for everyone!
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The Shift Left Architecture
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The Shift Left Architecture – From Batch and Lakehouse to Real-Time Data Products with Data Streaming

Data integration is a hard challenge in every enterprise. Batch processing and Reverse ETL are common practices in a data warehouse, data lake or lakehouse. Data inconsistency, high compute cost, and stale information are the consequences. This blog post introduces a new design pattern to solve these problems: The Shift Left Architecture enables a data mesh with real-time data products to unify transactional and analytical workloads with Apache Kafka, Flink and Iceberg. Consistent information is handled with streaming processing or ingested into Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, or any other analytics / AI platform to increase flexibility, reduce cost and enable a data-driven company culture with faster time-to-market building innovative software applications.
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Data Streaming is not a Race it is a Journey
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Data Streaming is not a Race, it is a Journey!

Data Streaming is not a race, it is a journey! Event-driven architectures and technologies like Apache Kafka or Apache Flink require a mind shift in architecting, developing, deploying, and monitoring applications. This blog post explores success stories from data streaming journeys across industries, including banking, retail, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, energy & utilities, and software companies.
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Is Amazon MSK Serverless for Apache Kafka a Self-Driving Car or just a Car Engine
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When NOT to choose Amazon MSK Serverless for Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka became the de facto standard for data streaming. Various cloud offerings emerged and improved in the last years. Amazon MSK Serverless is the latest Kafka product from AWS. This blog post looks at its capabilities to explore how it relates to “the normal” partially managed Amazon MSK, when the serverless version is a good choice, and when other fully-managed cloud services like Confluent Cloud are the better option.
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Data Warehouse and Data Lake Modernization with Data Streaming
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Data Warehouse and Data Lake Modernization: From Legacy On-Premise to Cloud-Native Infrastructure

The concepts and architectures of a data warehouse, a data lake, and data streaming are complementary to solving business problems. Unfortunately, the underlying technologies are often misunderstood, overused for monolithic and inflexible architectures, and pitched for wrong use cases by vendors. Let’s explore this dilemma in a blog series. This is part 3: Data Warehouse Modernization: From Legacy On-Premise to Cloud-Native Infrastructure.
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JMS Message Queue vs Apache Kafka Comparison
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Comparison: JMS Message Queue vs. Apache Kafka

Comparing JMS-based message queue (MQ) infrastructures and Apache Kafka-based data streaming is a widespread topic. Unfortunately, the battle is an apple-to-orange comparison that often includes misinformation and FUD from vendors. This blog post explores the differences, trade-offs, and architectures of JMS message brokers and Kafka deployments. Learn how to choose between JMS brokers like IBM MQ or RabbitMQ and open-source Kafka or serverless cloud services like Confluent Cloud.
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Machine Learning and Data Science with Apache Kafka in Healthcare
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Machine Learning and Data Science with Kafka in Healthcare

IT modernization and innovative new technologies change the healthcare industry significantly. This blog series explores how data streaming with Apache Kafka enables real-time data processing and business process automation. Real-world examples show how traditional enterprises and startups increase efficiency, reduce cost, and improve the human experience across the healthcare value chain, including pharma, insurance, providers, retail, and manufacturing. This is part five: Machine Learning and Data Science. Examples include Recursion and Humana.
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Kafka for Real-Time Replication between Edge and Hybrid Cloud

Not all workloads should go to the cloud! Low latency, cybersecurity, and cost-efficiency require a suitable combination of edge computing and cloud integration. This blog post explores hybrid data streaming with Apache Kafka anywhere. A live demo shows data synchronization from the edge to the public cloud across continents with Kafka on Hivecell edge hardware and serverless Confluent Cloud.
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