A decade ago, all developers could talk about was breaking down the monolith and event-driven architectures. Especially in the financial services industry, to become more nimble and accelerate their application delivery. They leveraged messaging systems to decouple the application, and specifically Apache Kafka has transitioned from being a data integration technology to the leading messaging system for microservices.

2021 is the year data engineers shift from analytics support to governing data flows. As data becomes an organization's most valuable commodity, it is those with the governance to confidently analyze and act on it that will develop the next big applications.