Kafka and Flink tend to get lumped in as "data services", in the sense that they process data, but in comparison to traditional databases they differ quite dramatically in functionality and utility. In this talk, we'll run through the lifetime of a write in Postgres to establish a baseline, understanding all the different services that data hits on its way down to the disk. Then we'll walk through writing data to a Kafka topic, and what 'writing' (or really, streaming) data to a Flink workflow looks like from a similar systems perspective. Along the way, we'll understand the key differences between the services and why some are more suited to long-term data storage than others.