The Architectural Lie at the Heart of Most Streaming Pipelines
Every real-time data pipeline I've seen in production eventually hits the same awkward moment: the stream processor hands off to the database.
Kafka to Flink. Flink to Postgres. Maybe a Redis layer squeezed in between for low-latency reads. Each hop is justified individually, and together they form a system that's expensive to operate, painful to debug, and full of subtle consistency gaps that only surface at 2am.
We've accepted this architecture so completely that it barely registers as a design choice anymore. It just feels like how streaming works.
But it's not a law of physics. It's a default we inherited.
