Structuring Realtime Data Streaming Into Actionable Insights

# **🎙 LIVE Podcast:** Building Real-Time Data Systems with Kafka & Iceberg — Featuring Olena Kutsenko. **Description:** Real-time data is no longer a luxury, it’s the backbone of every modern digital product. In this live episode, I sit down with Olena Kutsenko from Confluent to unpack what it really takes to build production-grade streaming architectures using Kafka, Flink, and Apache Iceberg. This session completes a trilogy after my previous episodes with Viktor Gamov and Alex Merced, where we explored streaming fundamentals and the rise of open table formats. Now it’s time to bring it all together, with real-world architectures, honest challenges, and practical lessons you can apply immediately. ## **🔥 What You’ll Learn in This Episode** * How real-time architectures are evolving in 2025 * When to adopt Iceberg (and when NOT to) * Why many streaming projects fail, from culture to design * The ideal architecture using **Kafka → Flink → Iceberg** * How to prevent topic explosion, schema drift, and data chaos * Insights from two real-world scenarios