The document discusses 3 realities of modern programming: 1) The rise of managed services where over half of Kafka users are using cloud versions. 2) Data is exploding in volume and streaming is needed. 3) Microservices have increased in popularity but communication between services can be complex; Kafka helps solve this as a backbone. Yelp moved to microservices and uses Kafka to connect over 70 services, saving $10M.