**Section 1 — The Context (The 'Why')**
Streaming analytics pipelines face the fundamental tension between low-latency ingestion and consistent aggregation at scale. The primary challenge is maintaining exactly-once or at-least-once semantics while supporting late-arriving events, handling backpressure when downstream processors cannot keep pace, and avoiding data skew when hot partitions (e.g., popular products) overwhelm single workers....
The complete answer continues with detailed implementation patterns, architectural trade-offs, and production-grade considerations. It covers performance optimization strategies, common pitfalls to avoid, and real-world examples from companies like Uber. The answer also includes follow-up discussion points that interviewers commonly explore.
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