[woloski]

The article is talking about webtask.io, the underlying engine for sandboxed code execution used by Auth0 for allowing customers to extend the platform with arbitrary nodejs code. In such system there is a need to acccess real time logs (think tail -f) while you are debugging your stuff.

Also, the emphasis is not just the real time aspect. The article mentions the issues with kafka for HA

[cma]

Real time has a technical meaning in software and that's what he is referring to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing

Live updated logs meant for human readability shouldn't need anything hard or soft real-time in the technical sense.

[rusanu]

Immediate (in human 'immediate' sense) visibility of a change via what basically is an ETL pipeline absolutely meets the technical meaning of "near-real-time data-processing" as in that the very link. The article meets "real-time ETL" in a very technical sense.