You now understand streaming fundamentals:
- Streaming processes unbounded data continuously
- Kafka provides durable, ordered event streaming
- Partitions enable parallelism; consumer groups enable scaling
- Exactly-once is possible but at-least-once with idempotency is often simpler
- Spark Streaming and Flink are the main processing frameworks
- Lambda uses batch and stream; Kappa is stream-only
For interviews, explain when streaming is worth the complexity. Most use cases don't need sub-second latency. Advocate for the simpler solution when appropriate.