The Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, and Apache Iceberg communities are pushing the boundaries of data management and processing, introducing new features and best practices that are transforming the way engineers build data systems. As these open-source technologies continue to evolve, they are influencing the development of data ecosystems, enabling real-time data processing, and improving data governance.

At the heart of this innovation are three key trends emerging from the Kafka, Flink, and Iceberg communities. The first trend involves re-envisioning microservices as Flink streaming applications, allowing for more reliable, lower-latency, and fault-tolerant data processing. By leveraging Flink's built-in accuracies, such as exactly-once semantics, developers can ensure that events are processed exactly once, end-to-end, with Kafka and Flink.

The second trend revolves around using Flink to quickly apply AI models to data with SQL. By combining Kafka and Flink, developers can create high-quality, reusable data streams that are essential for real-time, compound AI applications. Flink SQL enables the integration of AI models with a REST API, allowing for the use of custom, in-house AI models. This opens up a wide range of use cases, including classification, clustering, and regression, as well as sentiment analysis and sales lead scoring.

The third trend focuses on leveraging community-built Apache Iceberg tools, which have seen significant contributions in recent months. These tools enable the easy migration of Iceberg catalogs between cloud providers, analysis of Iceberg instance health, and the addition of statistics and metadata to data managed by Iceberg tables. As the Iceberg community continues to grow, data value will become more accessible, accelerating and scaling real-time use cases.

The synergy between Kafka, Flink, and Iceberg is driving innovation in data ecosystems, and staying current with the latest developments in these technologies will be crucial for data professionals. By keeping pace with trends and skills in this growing space, developers can unlock new possibilities for data management and processing.

As Adi Polak, director of advocacy and developer experience engineering at Confluent, notes, the dominance of these three technologies in their key functions, as well as the technological synergies among them, makes it essential to stay informed about the latest developments in Kafka, Flink, and Iceberg.

The New Tech Forum provides a platform for technology leaders to explore and discuss emerging enterprise technology in unprecedented depth and breadth. By staying up-to-date with the latest in data streaming engineering, developers can harness the full potential of Kafka, Flink, and Iceberg to revolutionize data management and processing.