Alibaba Cloud Native

Jun 19, 2026 · Big Data

Why Real-Time Data Lake Ingestion Is Dropping ETL in the AI Era: Architecture Simplification from Kafka to Iceberg

In the AI‑driven era, enterprises need a data foundation that supports both real‑time consumption and long‑term historical analysis, and the emerging "zero‑ETL" trend moves generic ingestion capabilities from external Flink/Spark jobs into a streamlined Kafka‑to‑Iceberg pipeline, reducing complexity while preserving low latency, consistency, schema evolution, CDC semantics and open‑ecosystem compatibility.