For years, streaming was too complex and costly. But serverless capabilities and new use cases are making real-time analytics a realistic option for most data teams—a look at how streaming is becoming more accessible in the data space.
Since the Hadoop era and the early days of Big Data, one prediction kept coming back year after year: “Next year will be the year of streaming.” There was a constant expectation that eventually, most (all?) data pipelines would evolve to real-time patterns instead of batch processing. Yet, despite the hype, real-time analytics has largely remained limited to tech giants and niche industries with highly specialized streaming needs.
By this time, the general consensus in the data space is “you don’t need streaming” / “batch is (mostly) always enough”. However, I believe 2025 might finally be the year streaming makes sense for common data use cases. This year, two key factors might allow real-time analytics to break out of its niche and finally hit the mainstream.