The research company Forrester defines data streaming platforms as a new software category in a new Forrester Wave. Apache Kafka is the de facto standard used by over 100,000 organizations. Plenty of vendors offer Kafka platforms and cloud services. Many complementary open-source stream processing frameworks like Apache Flink and related cloud offerings emerged. Competitive technologies like Pulsar, Redpanda, or WarpStream try to get market share by leveraging the Kafka protocol. This blog post explores the data streaming landscape of 2024 to summarize existing solutions and market trends. The end of the article gives an outlook on potential new entrants in 2025.
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