Current 2022: 4 Themes You Should Not Miss

Recently, RisingWave Labs’ team attended Current 2022, where over 2,000 people from around the globe gathered to see what is new and exciting in the world of data streaming technologies. There was a wide range of sessions and events available — attendees could get a taste of what is happening in the world of streaming. Broadly, four themes stood out for us:

Data Streaming is Ubiquitous

Data streaming is indeed everywhere. From anomaly detection in IoT devices to feature engineering to facilitate online ML, data streaming is applied in most modern applications in every conceivable business vertical. As the premier event for streaming, it showcased that streaming workloads are no longer a niche but a must as part of any data platform. New, dynamic data is generated continually; this requires real-time actions with almost instantaneous latency. Users are moving past the initial phase of streaming adoption, and the conference reiterated this fact. Streaming technologies are no longer solely focused on stream ingestion. Today, every business wants to create a new layer of business insight and control. With a data-driven, data-centric, and data-derived approach, businesses can analyze their data streaming pipelines in real time to provide a granular and accurate understanding of what's going on. Hence, it is no surprise: our team had several stimulating discussions with advanced users about the next stage of growth, which leads to the next theme.

Stream Processing is Growing

Stream processing is a big deal, and it goes beyond ingestion. The earlier mindset of using data stream just as an ingestion mechanism doesn't do justice to the potential of the data streaming field. The question on everyone's mind is: What do we do after we have set up the infrastructure to ingest the data? The obvious answer is to process data closer to the source. Processing the data in flight is becoming a must to derive the most value out of data. Stream processing is designed for immediate data processing and real-time analytics. The purpose is to enable you to respond to critical events by providing millisecond-level insights into what is happening within a system. Different technologies have put out many different approaches. The use cases have an influence on some of the distinctions. Clearly, stream processing is growing; everyone wants to reap the benefits. Today's consumers and businesses anticipate real-time action as a given.

Streaming Databases are the Next Frontier

The conference featured a number of sessions on streaming databases, streaming analytics, and real-time analytics. One approach that gained traction is using the full-featured database to not only process and store the streaming data but also to serve the results to the user applications directly. Several vendors are building solutions in this area. The audience's volume of inquiries on this subject revealed a keen and serious degree of attention. Some of the questions we received were to clarify the similarities and differences of our architecture vis-à-vis other vendors in the space. Our prediction is that this is a new frontier for data streaming. Streaming databases shorten the data pipeline cycle significantly. These systems provide the best opportunity to harness insights for event data with short shelf life. Streaming databases also help provide a unified solution like a traditional database for running an application.

Shameless plug: RisingWave is a streaming database. With RisingWave, stream processing is no longer the preserve of the few. You can easily ingest data across multiple data sources, run analytics and gain insight from seeing how things are happening in real time. RisingWave is the next-gen cloud-native streaming database. And RisingWave Cloud service is now available in private preview.

It’s about Interconnection

This conference is about making connections. The connection with partners and potential clients is fundamental to the growth of this movement, just as establishing a data pipeline necessitates connecting one service to another. Having a large number of streaming enthusiasts all in one place is an invigorating experience. This has inspired us to double down on our vision to democratize stream processing. We hope all attendees enjoyed the conference just as much as we did. Let's connect via Slack and start a dialog. Follow us on LinkedIn & Twitter for the latest updates.