Over the past decade, the shift towards digitization has prompted enterprises to redefine their business models and services to leverage data assets for real-time applications, facilitated by data pipelines. These pipelines, crucial for data movement and transformation, vary in type, including ETL, ELT, and reverse ETL, and aid in operational and analytical use cases. The traditional batch-based pipelines face challenges like inefficiency and rigidity, prompting a transition to streaming data pipelines that offer real-time data flow, flexibility, and decentralized governance. Confluent's approach emphasizes streaming pipelines for real-time data access, allowing organizations to innovate faster by breaking down data silos and enabling self-service data discovery. This modern approach, supported by Confluent’s data streaming platform, enhances productivity by offering real-time data streams that can be easily managed, enriched, and shared across cloud and on-premises systems, thereby overcoming the limitations of legacy pipelines.