In this episode, we chat with Giannis Polyzos, principal streaming architect at Ververica and long-time contributor to major stream-processing ecosystems including Flink, Fluss, and more. Giannis shares insights from a decade of building large-scale real-time systems and discusses why streaming adoption still lags despite improving technology. We explore the rise of Flink, the evolution of streaming architectures, and how new systems like Fluss and Paimon aim to simplify state management, unify tables and streams, and bring true low-latency processing into the modern data stack. Giannis also offers a rare window into China’s fast-moving data ecosystem, where streaming-first architectures and open table formats have advanced years ahead of Western markets.