Streaming is exciting, but it is also harder to build, operate, and reason about. The right question is not which is more modern, but how fresh your data truly needs to be.
Batch is often enough
If decisions are made hourly or daily, a scheduled batch job is simpler, cheaper, and easier to debug. Do not pay the streaming tax for data nobody reads in real time.
Reach for streaming when
- Seconds of latency genuinely change an outcome.
- You need to react to events as they happen.
- The cost of being out of date is high.
Many mature systems run both: streaming for the few things that need it, batch for everything else.