InfluxDB and Kafka are complementary tools that enable companies like Hulu to handle high volumes and velocities of time series data by providing real-time queries and analytics with integration to cutting-edge machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. A data streaming pipeline can be built using these tools, which includes sending data from a Kafka topic to InfluxDB Cloud Serverless using Telegraf, an open-source plugin-based tool. The process involves creating a Dockerfile, generating sample data, building the code file, setting up the InfluxDB Cloud Serverless account, and configuring mytelegraf.conf with necessary settings such as API tokens, URLs, organization, bucket, and Kafka brokers. After spinning up the containers using `docker compose up --build`, Telegraf displays messages indicating that it's reading and writing data to InfluxDB Cloud Serverless correctly. The Data Explorer can be used to query the data, making it simple to connect a Kafka cluster to InfluxDB Cloud Serverless for time series data management.