Streaming Fundamentals — Week 1 CheckWeek 1 of Stream Processing: what the compute layer adds above the broker, and what it takes to run it as a platform.

What fundamentally separates a stream PROCESSOR (Flink, Kafka Streams, Spark Structured Streaming) from a plain consumer?

A Flink job's checkpoint interval is the knob behind which core tradeoff?

Why do companies (Pinterest's Flink platform being the canonical case) build SELF-SERVICE streaming platforms instead of letting each team run its own cluster?

A streaming job's lag is growing steadily. The FIRST diagnostic split (as in the Lag: Slow Consumer or Producer Spike scenario) is:

Backpressure in a streaming DAG means:

Stateful streaming jobs make DEPLOYS harder than stateless services because: