How AI-Driven Real-Time Data Lakes Are Ditching ETL: A Kafka‑to‑Iceberg Architecture Simplification
In the AI era, enterprises need a data foundation that supports both low‑latency streaming and long‑term analytics, and the combination of Kafka, Iceberg and object storage is emerging as a preferred solution; by moving ingestion capabilities closer to the message layer and eliminating external ETL jobs, a "zero‑ETL" approach reduces architectural complexity, improves consistency, and streamlines schema evolution and small‑file management.
