Get Kafka-Nated S2E1: Giannis Polyzos on Fluss, Lakehouse, and the Future of Streaming

Feb 18, 2026

Season 2 of Get Kafka-Nated kicks off with Giannis Polyzos, member of the Fluss PMC, for a deep dive into one of data infrastructure’s longest-running debates: streaming vs. batch, or both?

What we’ll cover:

  • What Fluss is and the problems it aims to solve
  • Streaming vs. batch: why the debate isn’t either/or anymore
  • How Fluss fits into modern lakehouse architectures
  • Where lakehouses and streaming platforms are headed over the next few years
  • What this evolution means for data engineers and platform teams

Timestamps:

02:20 – What Is Apache Fluss and Why It Exists

05:30 – Streaming, Batch, and the Lakehouse Evolution

10:30 – Tables vs Topics: Rethinking Core Abstractions

15:40 – Apache Paimon, Iceberg, and Data Continuity

20:15 – Real-World Architectures and Stream-Batch Unification

25:45 – Streaming, AI, and Centralized Data for ML Pipelines

30:45 – Spark, Flink, and the Fluss Ecosystem

34:50 – Why Streaming Is Still Underrated

Useful links:

#ApacheKafka #StreamingData #Lakehouse #DataEngineering #Aiven