Ok, after having done some extensive reading about Druid here's what I have determined. If you run a Tranquility job the indexing service automatically runs. This is in effect what the "Realtime" node does. So, if you need to get data into Druid via something Tranquility does not offer, then you use a Realtime Node. As I am bringing data in from Kafka via Tranquility I have no need to run an actual Realtime node (which supports things like HTTP input). ... View more