**Why freshness matters**: SLA defines acceptable latency; architecture determines achievable freshness. **Streams (Kafka, Kinesis)**: Event flow; consumers read at offset. **Processing tasks**: Spark micro-batch (e.g., `trigger(processingTime="1 minute")`); Flink continuous. Freshness = ingestion latency + processing latency + sink latency. **Levers**: Reduce batch interval (trade throughput); increase parallelism; optimize checkpointing; backpressure handling....
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