Technology trends of the future: Real-Time Data Streaming is the way to go
2020 was the year of reshaping the way we think about big data, as we experienced how important it is to combine Artificial Intelligence (AI) in analyzing massive amounts of data to make decisions. Real-time data streaming is the way to go forward. While software developers are excited about new technologies to deliver information, real-time […]
On this page
2020 was the year of reshaping the way we think about big data, as we experienced how important it is to combine Artificial Intelligence (AI) in analyzing massive amounts of data to make decisions. Real-time data streaming is the way to go forward.
While software developers are excited about new technologies to deliver information, real-time data streaming’s implication goes beyond their workstations. In fact, it is already innovating technologies, and chances are, we’ve already experienced the changes.
What Is Real-Time Data Streaming?
Goodbye, big data, and hello real-time data streams.
In recent years, attention has shifted from the size of data to the speed of how they are obtained, processed, and delivered. That’s because the growing number of digitally-connected devices, apps, and cloud technologies, also called the Internet of Things or IoT has led to endless trails of information perpetuating the internet.
Real-time data streaming refers to the technologies and tools used to store and analyze a seemingly endless stream of data. It is starkly different from the conventional way of processing data in batches.
How Is Real-Time Data Streaming Shaping Technologies?
You don’t need to peek into the future to get a taste of real-time data streaming. Its application is already prevalent in many industries. Here’s what real-life examples and applications of real-time data streaming.
Forex/Trading Apps
Investing becomes easy when you can easily buy or sell a position with a couple of clicks. Besides the charts reflecting the actual prices of the commodities, shares, or currencies, you’ll also have pieces of information fed onto the app in real-time, that can influence the decisions of investors.
Digital Media
If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you would have noticed how it brilliantly recommends titles that you’re possibly interested in, before you’re even done with the current TV show. That’s how real-time data streaming works for the popular content provider. It picks up your personal information, analyzes, and matches it with the millions of titles in its library.
Real Estate Apps
The most popular online real-estate website and mobile app in the United States, Zillow provides updated home information to tens of millions of buyers and sellers every day. A primary feature of the Zillow website is the Zestimate—a home-valuation tool that provides buyers and sellers with the estimated market value for a specific home. Zillow currently offers Zestimates for more than 100 million homes in the U.S., with hundreds of attributes for each property.
Online Games
You led an army into battle, lost miserably, and before you knew it, you’ve got an irresistible offer of a weapon pack from the gaming company. That’s how quick the in-game experience is relayed, processed, and transformed into a premium incentive.
There are even more applications and use cases of real-time data streaming that can further explain how this concept can be used in the real world, for example, if we think about the banking sector or the energy sector, Rabobank and Eneco are two companies using Axual data streaming platform.
However, it’s not just the big players that can benefit from real-time data streaming.
How can small and medium businesses benefit from real-time data streaming?
The benefits of real-time data streaming go beyond day-to-day consumer apps. Small and medium businesses will benefit from the business intelligence gained from fresh data that helps to make timely, accurate operational decisions.
Business owners can avoid being blindsided by the likes of machine breakdowns, as various data from sensor points are streamed and processed to predict the probability of such incidents. You’re also able to prevent choking up the warehouse, as real-time data allows better planning of inventory movements.
As we mentioned previously, real-time data streaming can be applied to small to medium businesses. And this is thanks to the fact that these technologies and hardware are increasingly affordable, and the pool of experts in handling real-time data has also grown with more and more interest in scaling this to SMEs.
The bottom line is that businesses shying away from this inevitable innovative change in business decision making and intelligence will lose out big time in the future as competitors start to stay ahead of the game with real-time data.
Talk to us to learn how you can leverage real-time data streaming for your business or read our article: Apache Kafka use cases in real life.
Answers to your questions about Axual’s All-in-one Kafka Platform
Are you curious about our All-in-one Kafka platform? Dive into our FAQs
for all the details you need, and find the answers to your burning questions.
Small and medium-sized businesses can leverage real-time data streaming to gain valuable business intelligence, enabling timely and accurate operational decisions. By streaming data from sensor points, businesses can predict equipment failures, optimize inventory management, and respond swiftly to changing market conditions, ultimately enhancing efficiency and competitiveness in an increasingly data-driven landscape.
Related blogs
Apache Kafka has become a central component of modern data architectures, enabling real-time data streaming and integration across distributed systems. Within Kafka’s ecosystem, Kafka Connect plays a crucial role as a powerful framework designed for seamlessly moving data between Kafka and external systems. Kafka Connect provides a standardized, scalable approach to data integration, removing the need for complex custom scripts or applications. For architects, product owners, and senior engineers, Kafka Connect is essential to understand because it simplifies data pipelines and supports low-latency, fault-tolerant data flow across platforms. But what exactly is Kafka Connect, and how can it benefit your architecture?
Apache Kafka is a powerful platform for handling real-time data streaming, often used in systems that follow the Publish-Subscribe (Pub-Sub) model. In Pub-Sub, producers send messages (data) that consumers receive, enabling asynchronous communication between services. Kafka’s Pub-Sub model is designed for high throughput, reliability, and scalability, making it a preferred choice for applications needing to process massive volumes of data efficiently. Central to this functionality are topics and partitions—essential elements that organize and distribute messages across Kafka. But what exactly are topics and partitions, and why are they so important?
Strimzi Kafka offers an efficient solution for deploying and managing Apache Kafka on Kubernetes, making it easier to handle Kafka clusters within a Kubernetes environment. In this article, we'll guide you through opening a shell on a Kafka broker pod in Kubernetes and listing all the topics in your Kafka cluster using an SSL-based connection.