Unifying Stream Processing and Interactive Queries in Apache Kafka

Introduces Interactive Queries for Kafka Streams, allowing direct querying of application state without external databases. This feature leverages embedded databases (like RocksDB) within Kafka Streams applications to act as materialized views of Kafka topics, enabling hyper-convergence of processing and storage. The post contrasts this with traditional Lambda and Kappa architectures, highlighting benefits like reduced complexity, faster state access, and better application isolation. It also discusses tradeoffs when choosing between interactive queries and external databases.