Streaming Audio: Apache Kafka® & Real-Time Data

After recording 64 episodes and featuring 58 amazing guests, the Streaming Audio podcast series has amassed over 130,000 plays on YouTube in the last year. We're extremely proud of these achievements and feel that it's time to take a well-deserved break. Streaming Audio will be taking a vacation! We want to express our gratitude to you, our valued listeners, for spending 10,000 hours with us on this incredible journey.Rest assured, we will be back with more episodes! In the meantime, feel fre...

Have you ever struggled with managing data long term, especially as the schema changes over time? In order to manage and leverage data across an organization, it’s essential to have well-defined guidelines and standards in place around data quality, enforcement, and data transfer. To get started, Abraham Leal (Customer Success Technical Architect, Confluent) suggests that organizations associate their Apache Kafka® data with a data contract (schema). A data contract is an agreement between a ...

Can you use Apache Kafka® and Python together? What’s the current state of Python support? And what are the best options to get started? In this episode, Dave Klein joins Kris to talk about all things Kafka and Python: the libraries, the tools, and the pros & cons. He also talks about the new course he just launched to support Python programmers entering the event-streaming world.Dave has been an active member of the Kafka community for many years and noticed that there were a lot of Kafk...

In this episode, Kris interviews Doron Porat, Director of Infrastructure at Yotpo, and Liran Yogev, Director of Engineering at ZipRecruiter (formerly at Yotpo), about their experiences and strategies in dealing with data modeling at scale.Yotpo has a vast and active data lake, comprising thousands of datasets that are processed by different engines, primarily Apache Spark™. They wanted to provide users with self-service tools for generating and utilizing data with maximum flexibility, but enc...

Migrating Apache Kafka® clusters can be challenging, especially when moving large amounts of data while minimizing downtime. Michael Dunn (Solutions Architect, Confluent) has worked in the data space for many years, designing and managing systems to support high-volume applications. He has helped many organizations strategize, design, and implement successful Kafka cluster migrations between different environments. In this episode, Michael shares some tips about Kafka cluster migration with K...

dbt is known as being part of the Modern Data Stack for ELT processes. Being in the MDS, dbt Labs believes in having the best of breed for every part of the stack. Oftentimes folks are using an EL tool like Fivetran to pull data from the database into the warehouse, then using dbt to manage the transformations in the warehouse. Analysts can then build dashboards on top of that data, or execute tests.It’s possible for an analyst to adapt this process for use with a microservice application usi...

What’s the next big thing in the future of streaming data? In this episode, Greg DeMichillie (VP of Product and Solutions Marketing, Confluent) talks to Kris about the future of stream processing in environments where the value of data lies in their ability to intercept and interpret data.Greg explains that organizations typically focus on the infrastructure containers themselves, and not on the thousands of data connections that form within. When they finally realize that they don't have a w...

What can online gaming teach us about making large-scale event management more collaborative in real-time? Ben Gamble (Developer Relations Manager, Aiven) has come to the world of real-time event streaming from an usual source: the video games industry. And if you stop to think about it, modern online games are complex, distributed real-time data systems with decades of innovative techniques to teach us.In this episode, Ben talks with Kris about integrating gaming concepts with Apache K...

Apache Kafka® 3.4 is released! In this special episode, Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent), shares highlights of the Apache Kafka 3.4 release. This release introduces new KIPs in Kafka Core, Kafka Streams, and Kafka Connect.In Kafka Core:KIP-792 expands the metadata each group member passes to the group leader in its JoinGroup subscription to include the highest stable generation that consumer was a part of. KIP-830 includes a new configuration setting that allows you to ...

How can you use OpenTelemetry to gain insight into your Apache Kafka® event systems? Roman Kolesnev, Staff Customer Innovation Engineer at Confluent, is a member of the Customer Solutions & Innovation Division Labs team working to build business-critical OpenTelemetry applications so companies can see what’s happening inside their data pipelines. In this episode, Roman joins Kris to discuss tracing and monitoring in distributed systems using OpenTelemetry. He talks about how monitoring ea...

Data democratization allows everyone in an organization to have access to the data they need, and the necessary tools needed to use this data effectively. In short, data democratization enables better business decisions. In this episode, Rama Ryali, a Senior IT and Data Executive, chats with Kris Jenkins about the importance of data democratization in modern systems.Rama explains that tech has unprecedented control over data and ignores basic business needs. Tech’s influence has largely ...

Is it possible to manage and test data like code? lakeFS is an open-source data version control tool that transforms object storage into Git-like repositories, offering teams a way to use the same workflows for code and data. In this episode, Kris sits down with guest Adi Polak, VP of DevX at Treeverse, to discuss how lakeFS can be used to facilitate better management and testing of data.At its core, lakeFS provides teams with better data management. A theoretical data engineer on a large tea...

How does leader election work in Apache Kafka®? For the past 2 ½ years, Adithya Chandra, Staff Software Engineer at Confluent, has been working on Kafka scalability and performance, specifically partition leader election. In this episode, he gives Kris Jenkins a deep dive into the power of leader election in Kafka replication, why we need it, how it works, what can go wrong, and how it's being improved.Adithya explains that you can configure a certain number of replicas to be distributed acro...

Are bad customer experiences really just data integration problems? Can real-time data streaming and machine learning be democratized in order to deliver a better customer experience? Airy, an open-source data-streaming platform, uses Apache Kafka® to help business teams deliver better results to their customers. In this episode, Airy CEO and co-founder Steffen Hoellinger explains how his company is expanding the reach of stream-processing tools and ideas beyond the world of programmers.Airy ...

The past year saw new trends emerge in the world of data streaming technologies, as well as some unexpected and novel use cases for Apache Kafka®. New reflections on the future of stream processing and when companies should adopt microservice architecture inspired several talks at this year’s industry conferences. In this episode, Kris is joined by his colleagues Danica Fine, Senior Developer Advocate, and Robin Moffatt, Principal Developer Advocate, for an end-of-year roundtable on this year...

Entomophiliac, Anna McDonald (Principal Customer Success Technical Architect, Confluent) has seen her fair share of Apache Kafka® bugs. For her annual holiday roundup of the most noteworthy Kafka bugs, Anna tells Kris Jenkins about some of the scariest, most surprising, and most enlightening corner cases that make you ask, “Ah, so that’s how it really works?”She shares a lot of interesting details about how batching works, the replication protocol, how Kafka’s networking stack dances with Lin...

Could you explain Apache Kafka® in ways that a small child could understand? When Mitch Seymour, author of Mastering Kafka Streams and ksqlDB, wanted a way to communicate the basics of Kafka and event-based stream processing, he decided to author a children’s book on the subject, but it turned into something with a far broader appeal.Mitch conceived the idea while writing a traditional manuscript for engineers and technicians interested in building stream processing applications. He wished he...

What are the key factors to consider when developing event-driven architecture? When properly designed, events can connect existing systems with a common language and allow data exchange in near real time. They also help reduce complexity by providing a single source of truth that eliminates the need to synchronize data between different services or applications. They enable dynamic behavior, allowing each service or application to respond quickly to changes in its environment. Using events, ...

Is there a better way to manage access to resources without compromising security? New employees need access to a variety of resources within a company's tech stack. But manually granting access can be error-prone. And when employees leave, their access must be revoked, thus potentially introducing security risks if an admin misses one. In this podcast, Kris Jenkins talks to Anuj Sawani (Security Product Manager, Confluent) about the centralized identity management system he helped build to i...

Can we use machine learning to detect security threats in real-time? As organizations increasingly rely on distributed systems, it is becoming more important to analyze the traffic that passes through those systems quickly. Confluent Hackathon ’22 finalist, Géraud Dugé de Bernonville (Data Consultant, Zenika Bordeaux), shares how his team used TensorFlow (machine learning) and Neo4j (graph database) to analyze and detect network traffic data in real-time. What started as a research and develo...

What happens when you need to store more than a few petabytes of data? Rittika Adhikari (Software Engineer, Confluent) discusses how her team implemented tiered storage, a method for improving the scalability and elasticity of data storage in Apache Kafka®. She also explores the motivating factors for building it in the first place: cost, performance, and manageability. Before Tiered Storage, there was no real way to retain Kafka data indefinitely. Because of the tight coupling between c...

In principle, data mesh architecture should liberate teams to build their systems and gather data in a distributed way, without having to explicitly coordinate. Data is the thing that can and should decouple teams, but proper implementation has its challenges.In this episode, Kris talks to Florian Albrecht (Solution Architect, Hermes Germany) about Galapagos, an open-source DevOps software tool for Apache Kafka® that Albrecht created with his team at Hermes, a German parcel delivery company.&...

Is real-time data streaming the future, or will batch processing always be with us? Interest in streaming data architecture is booming, but just as many teams are still happily batching away. Batch processing is still simpler to implement than stream processing, and successfully moving from batch to streaming requires a significant change to a team’s habits and processes, as well as a meaningful upfront investment. Some are even running dbt in micro batches to simulate an effect similar to st...

Streaming real-time data at scale and processing it efficiently is critical to cybersecurity organizations like SecurityScorecard. Jared Smith, Senior Director of Threat Intelligence, and Brandon Brown, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform at SecurityScorecard, discuss their journey from using RabbitMQ to open-source Apache Kafka® for stream processing. As well as why turning to fully-managed Kafka on Confluent Cloud is the right choice for building real-time data pipelines at scale....

What are some recommendations to consider when running Apache Kafka® in production? Jun Rao, one of the original Kafka creators, as well as an ongoing committer and PMC member, shares the essential wisdom he's gained from developing Kafka and dealing with a large number of Kafka use cases.Here are 6 recommendations for maximizing Kafka in production:1. Nail Down the Operational PartWhen setting up your cluster, in addition to dealing with the usual architectural issues, make sure to also inve...

Is it possible to build a real-time data platform without using stateful stream processing? Forecasty.ai is an artificial intelligence platform for forecasting commodity prices, imparting insights into the future valuations of raw materials for users. Nearly all AI models are batch-trained once, but precious commodities are linked to ever-fluctuating global financial markets, which require real-time insights. In this episode, Ralph Debusmann (CTO, Forecasty.ai) shares their journey of migrati...

Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) impact Apache Kafka® performance in production. How can you optimize your event-streaming architectures so they process more Kafka messages using the same number of JVMs? Gil Tene (CTO and Co-Founder, Azul) delves into JVM internals and how developers and architects can use Java and optimized JVMs to make real-time data pipelines more performant and more cost effective, with use cases.Gil has deep roots in Java optimization, having started out building large data ...

Apache Kafka® 3.3 is released! With over two years of development, KIP-833 marks KRaft as production ready for new AK 3.3 clusters only. On behalf of the Kafka community, Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent) shares highlights of this release, with KIPs from Kafka Core, Kafka Streams, and Kafka Connect. To reduce request overhead and simplify client-side code, KIP-709 extends the OffsetFetch API requests to accept multiple consumer group IDs. This update has three changes, i...

How do you set data applications in motion by running stateful business logic on streaming data? Capturing key stream processing events and cumulative statistics that necessitate real-time data assessment, migration, and visualization remains as a gap—for event-driven systems and stream processing frameworks according to Fred Patton (Developer Evangelist, Swim Inc.) In this episode, Fred explains streaming applications and how it contrasts with stream processing applications. Fred and Kris al...

What’s your favorite podcast? Would you like to find some new ones? In celebration of International Podcast Day, Kris Jenkins invites 12 experts from the Apache Kafka® community to talk about their favorite podcasts. Unlike other episodes where guests educate developers and tell stories about Kafka, its surrounding technological ecosystem, or the Cloud, this special episode provides a glimpse into what these guests have learned through listening to podcasts that you might also find interestin...

How do you build an event-driven application that can react to real-time data streams as they happen? Kris Jenkins (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent) will be hosting another fun, hands-on programming workshop—Coding in Motion: Watching the River Flow, to demonstrate how you can build a reactive event streaming application with Apache Kafka®, ksqlDB using Python.As a developer advocate, Kris often speaks at conferences, and the presentation will be available on-demand through the organizer...

Processing real-time event streams enables countless use cases big and small. With a day job designing and building highly available distributed data systems, Simon Aubury (Principal Data Engineer, Thoughtworks) believes stream-processing thinking can be applied to any stream of events. In this episode, Simon shares his Confluent Hackathon ’22 winning project—a wildlife monitoring system to observe population trends over time using a Raspberry Pi, along with Apache Kafka®, Kafka Connect,...

How do you analyze Reddit sentiment with Apache Kafka® and microservices? Bringing the fresh perspective of someone who is both new to Kafka and the industry, Shufan Liu, nascent Developer Advocate at Confluent, discusses projects he has worked on during his summer internship—a Cluster Linking extension to a conceptual data pipeline project, and a microservice-based Reddit sentiment-analysis project. Shufan demonstrates that it’s possible to quickly get up to speed with the tools in the Kafka...

How do you plan Apache Kafka® capacity and Kafka Streams sizing for optimal performance? When Jason Bell (Principal Engineer, Dataworks and founder of Synthetica Data), begins to plan a Kafka cluster, he starts with a deep inspection of the customer's data itself—determining its volume as well as its contents: Is it JSON, straight pieces of text, or images? He then determines if Kafka is a good fit for the project overall, a decision he bases on volume, the desired architecture, as well ...

Reimagining a data architecture to provide real-time data flow for sporting events can be complicated, especially for organizations with as much data as World Table Tennis (WTT). Vatsan Rama (Director of IT, ITTF Group) shares why real-time data is essential in the sporting world and how his team reengineered their data system in 18 months, moving from a solely on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-native data system that uses Confluent Cloud with Apache Kafka® as its central nervous system.&...

Inheriting software in the banking sector can be challenging. Perhaps the only thing harder is inheriting software built by a committee of banks. How do you keep it running, while improving it, refactoring it, and planning a bigger future for it? In this episode, Jean-Francois Garet (Technical Architect, Symphony) shares his experience at Symphony as he helps it evolve from an inherited, monolithic, single-tenant architecture to an event mesh for seamless event-streaming microservices. He tal...

Security is a primary consideration for any system design, and Apache Kafka® is no exception. Out of the box, Kafka has relatively little security enabled. Rajini Sivaram (Principal Engineer, Confluent, and co-author of “Kafka: The Definitive Guide” ) discusses how Kafka has gone from a system that included no security to providing an extensible and flexible platform for any business to build a secure messaging system. She shares considerations, important best practices, and features Kafka pr...

Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is the Java API used to connect to a database. As one of the most popular Kafka connectors, it's important to prevent issues with your integrations. In this episode, we'll cover how a JDBC connection works, and common issues with your database connection. Why the Kafka JDBC Connector? When it comes to streaming database events into Apache Kafka®, the JDBC connector usually represents the first choice for its flexibility and the ability to support a wide ...

Setting up a reliable cloud networking for your Apache Kafka® infrastructure can be complex. There are many factors to consider—cost, security, scalability, and availability. With immense experience building cloud-native Kafka solutions on Confluent Cloud, Justin Lee (Principal Solutions Engineer, Enterprise Solutions Engineering, Confluent) and Dennis Wittekind (Customer Success Technical Architect, Customer Success Engineering, Confluent) talk about the different networking options on Confl...

How do the principles of chaotic, agile operations in the military apply to software development and event-driven systems? As a former Royal Marine, Ben Ford (Founder and CEO, Commando Development) is also a software developer, with many years of experience building event streaming architectures across financial services and startups. He shares principles that the military employs in chaotic conditions as well as how these can be applied to event-streaming and agile development.According to B...

Imagine you can process and analyze real-time event streams for intelligence to mitigate cyber threats or keep soldiers constantly alerted to risks and precautions they should take based on events. In this episode, Jeffrey Needham (Senior Solutions Engineer, Advanced Technology Group, Confluent) shares use cases on how Apache Kafka® can be used for real-time signal processing to mitigate risk before it arises. He also explains the classic Kafka transactional processing defaults and the distin...

How is Apache Kafka® relevant to blockchain technology and cryptocurrency? Fotios Filacouris (Staff Solutions Engineer, Confluent) has been working with Kafka for close to five years, primarily designing architectural solutions for financial services, he also has expertise in the blockchain. In this episode, he joins Kris to discuss how blockchain and Kafka are complementary, and he also highlights some of the use cases he has seen emerging that use Kafka in conjunction with traditional, dist...

To ensure safe and efficient deployment of Apache Kafka® clusters across multiple cloud providers, Confluent rolled out a large scale cluster management solution.Rashmi Prabhu (Staff Software Engineer & Eng Manager, Fleet Management Platform, Confluent) and her team have been building the Fleet Management Platform for Confluent Cloud. In this episode, she delves into what Fleet Management is, and how the cluster management service streamlines Kafka operations in the cloud while providing ...

What are some of the common mistakes that you have seen with Apache Kafka® record production and consumption? Nikoleta Verbeck (Principal Solutions Architect at Professional Services, Confluent) has a role that specifically tasks her with performance tuning as well as troubleshooting Kafka installations of all kinds. Based on her field experience, she put together a comprehensive list of common issues with recommendations for building, maintaining, and improving Kafka systems that are applica...

A well-written abstract is your ticket to conferences, but how do you write an excellent synopsis that will get accepted? As an experienced conference speaker, Robin Moffatt (Principal Developer Advocate, Confluent) often writes presentations that help the developer community to understand Apache Kafka® and its ecosystem. He is also the Program Committee Chair for Kafka Summit and Current 2022: The Next Generation of Kafka Summit. Having seen hundreds of conference submissions, Robin shares b...

What is a developer advocate and how do you become one? In this episode, we have seasoned developer advocates, Kris Jenkins (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent) and Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent) answer the question by diving into how they got into the world of developer relations, what they enjoyed the most about their roles, and how you can become one.Developer advocacy is at the heart of a developer community—helping developers and software engineers to get the most o...

Data mesh isn’t software you can download and install, so how do you build a data mesh? In this episode, Adam Bellemare (Staff Technologist, Office of the CTO, Confluent) discusses his data mesh proof of concept and how it can help you conceptualize the ways in which implementing a data mesh could benefit your organization.Adam begins by noting that while data mesh is a type of modern data architecture, it is only partially a technical issue. For instance, it encompasses the best way to enabl...

Stream processing can be hard or easy depending on the approach you take, and the tools you choose. This sentiment is at the heart of the discussion with Matthias J. Sax (Apache Kafka® PMC member; Software Engineer, ksqlDB and Kafka Streams, Confluent) and Jeff Bean (Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, Confluent). With immense collective experience in Kafka, ksqlDB, Kafka Streams, and Apache Flink®, they delve into the types of stream processing operations and explain the different ways of solvi...

Apache Kafka® isn’t just for day jobs according to Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent). It can be used to make life easier at home, too!Building out a practical Apache Kafka® data pipeline is not always complicated—it can be simple and fun. For Danica, the idea of building a Kafka-based data pipeline sprouted with the need to monitor the water level of her plants at home. In this episode, she explains the architecture of her hardware-oriented project and discusses how she integ...

Apache Kafka® 3.2 delivers new KIPs in three different areas of the Kafka ecosystem: Kafka Core, Kafka Streams, and Kafka Connect. On behalf of the Kafka community, Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent), shares release highlights.More than half of the KIPs in the new release concern Kafka Core. KIP-704 addresses unclean leader elections by allowing for further communication between the controller and the brokers. KIP-764 takes on the problem of a large number of client conn...

How much can Apache Kafka® scale horizontally, and how can you automatically balance, or rebalance data to ensure optimal performance?You may require the flexibility to scale or shrink your Kafka clusters based on demand. With experience engineering cluster elasticity and capacity management features for cloud-native Kafka, Ajit Yagaty (Confluent Cloud Control Plane Engineering) and Aashish Kohli (Confluent Cloud Product Management) join Kris Jenkins in this episode to explain how the archite...

What are useful practices for migrating a system to Apache Kafka® and Confluent Cloud, and why use Confluent to modernize your architecture?Dima Kalashnikov (Technical Lead, Picnic Technologies) is part of a small analytics platform team at Picnic, an online-only, European grocery store that processes around 45 million customer events and five million internal events daily. An underlying goal at Picnic is to try and make decisions as data-driven as possible, so Dima's team collects events on ...

Coding is inherently enjoyable and experimental. With the goal of bringing fun into programming, Kris Jenkins (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent) hosts a new series of hands-on workshops—Coding in Motion, to teach you how to use Apache Kafka® and data streaming technologies for real-life use cases. In the first episode, Sound & Vision, Kris walks you through the end-to-end process of building a real-time, full-stack data streaming application from scratch using Kafka and JavaScrip...

You already know Apache Kafka® is a distributed event streaming system for setting your data in motion, but how does its internal architecture work? No one can explain Kafka’s internal architecture better than Jun Rao, one of its original creators and Co-Founder of Confluent. Jun has an in-depth understanding of Kafka that few others can claim—and he shares that with us in this episode, and in his new Kafka Internals course on Confluent Developer. One of Jun's goals in publishing the Kaf...

What is event modeling and how does it differ from standard data modeling?In this episode of Streaming Audio, Bobby Calderwood, founder of Evident Systems and creator of oNote observes that at the dawn of the computer age, due to the fact that memory and computing power were expensive, people began to move away from time-and-narrative-oriented record-keeping systems (in the manner of a ship's log or a financial ledger) to systems based on aggregation. Such data-model systems, still dominant t...

New Relic runs one of the larger Apache Kafka® installations in the world, ingesting circa 125 petabytes a month, or approximately three billion data points per minute. Anton Rodriguez is the architect of the system, responsible for hundreds of clusters and thousands of clients, some of them implemented in non-standard technologies. In addition to the large volume of servers, he works with many teams, which must all work together when issues arise.Monitoring New Relic's large Kafka installati...

Confluent Platform 7.1 expands upon its already innovative features, adding improvements in key areas that benefit data consistency, allow for increased speed and scale, and enhance resilience and reliability.Previously, the Confluent Platform 7.0 release introduced Cluster Linking, which enables you to bridge on-premises and cloud clusters, among other configurations. Maintaining data quality standards across multiple environments can be challenging though. To assist with this problem, CP 7....

Scaling Apache Kafka® can be tricky, let alone scaling a team. When he was first hired, Domenico Fioravanti of Therapie Clinic was given the challenging task of assembling a sizable tech team from scratch, while simultaneously building a scalable and decoupled architecture from the ground up. In addition, he wanted to deliver value to the company from day one. One way that Domenico ultimately accomplished these goals was by focusing on managed solutions in order to avoid large investments in ...

What is GraphQL? And how can you combine GraphQL with Apache Kafka® to query data in real time?With over 10 years of experience as a backend engineer, Gerard Klijs is a Confluent Community Catalyst, a contributor to several GraphQL libraries, and also a creator and maintainer of a Rust library to use Confluent Schema Registry with Java client. In this episode, he explains why you want to use Kafka with GraphQL and how they work together to bridge the gap between backend and frontend to make d...

Data availability, usability, integrity, and security are words that we sometimes hear a lot. But what do they actually look like when put into practice? That’s where data governance comes in. This becomes especially tricky when working with real-time data architectures.Tushar Thole (Senior Manager, Engineering, Trust & Security, Confluent) focuses on delivering features for software-defined storage, software-defined networking (SD-WAN), security, and cloud-native domains. In this episode...

How many messages can Apache Kafka® process per second? At Honeycomb, it's easily over one million messages. In this episode, get a taste of how Honeycomb uses Kafka on massive scale. Liz Fong-Jones (Principal Developer Advocate, Honeycomb) explains how Honeycomb manages Kafka-based telemetry ingestion pipelines and scales Kafka clusters. And what is Honeycomb? Honeycomb is an observability platform that helps you visualize, analyze, and improve cloud application quality...

With experience in data infrastructure and distributed data technologies, author of the book “Designing Event-Driven Systems” Ben Stopford (Lead Technologist, Office of the CTO, Confluent) explains the data mesh paradigm, differences between traditional data warehouses and microservices, as well as how you can get started with data mesh. Unlike standard data architecture, data mesh is about moving data away from a monolithic data warehouse into distributed data systems. Doing so w...

What is serverless?Having worked as a software engineer for over 15 years and as a regular contributor to Kafka Streams, Bill Bejeck (Integration Architect, Confluent) is an Apache Kafka® committer and author of “Kafka Streams in Action.” In today’s episode, he explains what serverless and the architectural concepts behind it are. To clarify, serverless doesn’t mean you can run an application without a server—there are still servers in the architecture, but they are abstracted away from ...

When it comes to Apache Kafka®, there’s no one better to tell the story than Jay Kreps (Co-Founder and CEO, Confluent), one of the original creators of Kafka. In this episode, he talks about the evolution of Kafka from in-house infrastructure to a managed cloud service and discusses what’s next for infrastructure engineers who used to self-manage the workload. Kafka started out at LinkedIn as a distributed stream processing framework and was core to their central data pipeline. At the ti...

Meet your new host of the Streaming Audio podcast: Kris Jenkins (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent)! In this preview, Kris shares a few highlights from forthcoming episodes to look forward to, spanning topics from data mesh, cloud-native technologies, and serverless Apache Kafka®, to data modeling. As a developer advocate, Kris is endlessly fascinated about software design, functional programming, real-time systems, and electronic music. He is a veteran software developer and engineer...

After nearly 200 podcast episodes of Streaming Audio, Tim Berglund bids farewell in his last episode as host of the show. Tim reflects on the many great memories with guests who have appeared on the segment—and each for its own reasons. He has covered a wide variety of topics, ranging from Apache Kafka® fundamentals, microservices, event stream processing, use cases, to cloud-native Kafka, data mesh, and more. As Tim mentions, the Streaming Audio podcast will continue on to explore ...

What is event sourcing and how does it work?Event sourcing is often used interchangeably with event-driven architecture and event stream processing. However, Anna McDonald (Principal Customer Success Technical Architect, Confluent) explains it's a specific category of its own—an event streaming pattern. Anna is passionate about event-driven architectures and event patterns. She’s a tour de force in the Apache Kafka® community and is the presenter of the Event Sourcing and Event Storage w...

In an effort to make Apache Kafka® cloud native, Anna Povzener (Principal Engineer, Confluent) and Anastasia Vela (Software Engineer I, Confluent) have been working to expand multi-tenancy to cloud-native systems with automated capacity planning and scaling in Confluent Cloud. They explain how cloud-native data systems are different from legacy databases and share the technical requirements needed to create multi-tenancy for managed Kafka as a service. As a distributed system, Kafka is d...

Apache Kafka® 3.1 is here with exciting new features and improvements! On behalf of the Kafka community, Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent) shares release highlights that you won’t want to miss, including foreign-key joins in Kafka Streams and improvements that will provide consistency for Kafka latency metrics. KAFKA-13439 deprecates the eager protocol, which has been the default since Kafka 2.4—it’s advised to upgrade your applications to the cooperative protocol as the...

Maximizing cloud Apache Kafka® performance isn’t just about running data processes on cloud instances. There is a lot of engineering work required to set and maintain a high-performance standard for speed and availability. Alok Nikhil (Senior Software Engineer, Confluent) and Adithya Chandra (Staff Software Engineer II, Confluent) share about their efforts on how to optimize Kafka on Confluent Cloud and the three guiding principles that they follow whether you are self-managing Kafka&nbs...

Implementing an event-driven data pipeline can be challenging, but doing so within the context of a legacy architecture is even more complex. Having spent three years building a streaming data infrastructure and being on the first team at a financial organization to implement Apache Kafka® event-driven data pipelines, Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent) shares about the development process and how ksqlDB and Kafka Connect became instrumental to the implementation.By moving away...

Getting data from a database management system (DBMS) into Apache Kafka® in real time is a subject of ongoing innovation. John Neal (Principal Solution Architect, Qlik) and Adam Mayer (Senior Technical Producer Marketing Manager, Qlik) explain how leveraging change data capture (CDC) for data ingestion into Kafka enables real-time data-driven insights. It can be challenging to ingest data in real time. It is even more challenging when you have multiple data sources, including both tradit...

It’s been said that financial services organizations have been early Apache Kafka® adopters due to the strong delivery guarantees and scalability that Kafka provides. With experience working and designing architectural solutions for financial services, Fotios Filacouris (Senior Solutions Engineer, Enterprise Solutions Engineering, Confluent) joins Tim to discuss how Kafka and Confluent help banks build modern architectures, highlighting key emerging use cases from the sector. Previously,...

What’s it like building a stream processing platform with around 300 stateful stream processing applications based on Kafka Streams? Levani Kokhreidze (Principal Engineer, Wise) shares his experience building such a platform that the business depends on for multi-currency movements across the globe. He explains how his team uses Kafka Streams for real-time money transfers at Wise, a fintech organization that facilitates international currency transfers for 11 million customers. Getting t...

You might call building and operating Apache Kafka® as a cloud-native data service synonymous with a serverless experience. Prachetaa Raghavan (Staff Software Developer I, Confluent) spends his days focused on this very thing. In this podcast, he shares his learnings from implementing a serverless architecture on Confluent Cloud using Kubernetes Operator. Serverless is a cloud execution model that abstracts away server management, letting you run code on a pay-per-use basis without infra...

What does cloud native mean, and what are some design considerations when implementing cloud-native data services? Gwen Shapira (Apache Kafka® Committer and Principal Engineer II, Confluent) addresses these questions in today’s episode. She shares her learnings by discussing a series of technical papers published by her team, which explains what they’ve done to expand Kafka’s cloud-native capabilities on Confluent Cloud. Gwen leads the Cloud-Native Kafka team, which focuses on developing...

What is ksqlDB and how does Simon Aubury (Principal Data Engineer, Thoughtworks) use it to track down the plane that wakes his cat Snowy in the morning? Experienced in building real-time applications with ksqlDB since its genesis, Simon provides an introduction to ksqlDB by sharing some of his projects and use cases. ksqlDB is a database purpose-built for stream processing applications and lets you build real-time data streaming applications with SQL syntax. ksqlDB reduces the complexity...

Many of us find ourselves in the position of equipping others to use Apache Kafka® after we’ve gained an understanding of what Kafka is used for. But how do you communicate and teach others event streaming concepts effectively? As a Pluralsight instructor and business intelligence consultant, Eugene Meidinger shares tips for creating consumable training materials for conveying event streaming concepts to developers and IT administrators, who are trying to get on board with Kafka and stream pr...

If you ever wondered what exactly dead letter queues (DLQs) are and how to use them, Jason Bell (Senior DataOps Engineer, Digitalis) has an answer for you. Dead letter queues are a feature of Kafka Connect that acts as the destination for failed messages due to errors like improper message deserialization and improper message formatting. Lots of Jason’s work is around Kafka Connect and the Kafka Streams API, and in this episode, he explains the fundamentals of dead letter queues, how to use t...

Confluent Platform 7.0 has launched and includes Apache Kafka® 3.0, plus new features introduced by KIP-630: Kafka Raft Snapshot, KIP-745: Connect API to restart connector and task, and KIP-695: Further improve Kafka Streams timestamp synchronization. Reporting from Dubai, Tim Berglund (Senior Director, Developer Advocacy, Confluent) provides a summary of new features, updates, and improvements to the 7.0 release, including the ability to create a real-time bridge from on-premises environment...

Kafka Streams is a native streaming library for Apache Kafka® that consumes messages from Kafka to perform operations like filtering a topic’s message and producing output back into Kafka. After working as a developer in stream processing, Bill Bejeck (Apache Kafka Committer and Integration Architect, Confluent) has found his calling in sharing knowledge and authoring his book, “Kafka Streams in Action.” As a Kafka Streams expert, Bill is also the author of the Kafka Streams 101 course on Con...

Managing infrastructure as code (IaC) instead of using manual processes makes it easy to scale systems and minimize errors. Rosemary Wang (Developer Advocate, HashiCorp, and author of “Essential Infrastructure as Code: Patterns and Practices”) is an infrastructure engineer at heart and an aspiring software developer who is passionate about teaching patterns for infrastructure as code to simplify processes for system admins and software engineers familiar with Python, provisioning tools like T...

What’s the distinction between the Spring Framework and Spring Boot? If you are building a car, the Spring Framework is the engine while Spring Boot gives you the vehicle that you ride in. With experience teaching and answering questions on how to use Spring and Apache Kafka® together, Viktor Gamov (Principal Developer Advocate, Kong) designed a free course on Confluent Developer and previews it in this episode. Not only this, but he also explains why the opinionated Spring Framework would be...

When you order a pizza, what if you knew every step of the process from the moment it goes in the oven to being delivered to your doorstep? Event-Driven Architecture is a modern, data-driven approach that describes “events” (i.e., something that just happened). A real-time data infrastructure enables you to provide such event-driven data insights in real time. Israel Ekpo (Principal Cloud Solutions Architect, Microsoft Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft) and Alicia Moniz (Cloud Partner ...

Autonomy is key in building a sustainable and motivated team, and this core principle also applies to DevOps. Building self-serve Apache Kafka® and Confluent Platform deployments require a streamlined process with unrestricted tools—a centralized processing tool that allows teams in large or mid-sized organizations to automate infrastructure changes while ensuring shared standards are met. With more than 15 years of engineering and technology consulting experience, Pere Urbón-Bayes (Senior So...

Kafka Connect is a streaming integration framework between Apache Kafka® and external systems, such as databases and cloud services. With expertise in ksqlDB and Kafka Connect, Robin Moffatt (Staff Developer Advocate, Confluent) helps and supports the developer community in understanding Kafka and its ecosystem. Recently, Robin authored a Kafka Connect 101 course that will help you understand the basic concepts of Kafka Connect, its key features, and how it works.What’s Kafka Connect, and how...

As one of the top coders of her Java coding class in high school, Twesha Modi is continuing to follow her passion for computer science as a senior at Cornell University, where she has proven to be one of the top programmers. During Twesha's summer internship at Confluent, she contributed to designing a new service to automate Apache Kafka® cluster rollout management—a process that releases the latest Kafka versions to customer’s clusters in Confluent Cloud.During Twesha’s internship, she was ...

Apache Kafka® 3.0 is out! To spotlight major enhancements in this release, Tim Berglund (Apache Kafka Developer Advocate) provides a summary of what’s new in the Kafka 3.0 release from Krakow, Poland, including API changes and improvements to the early-access Kafka Raft (KRaft). KRaft is a built-in Kafka consensus mechanism that’s replacing Apache ZooKeeper going forward. It is recommended to try out new KRaft features in a development environment, as KRaft is not advised for production ...

A developer community brings people with shared interests and purpose together. The fundamental elements of a community are to gather, learn, support, and create opportunities for collaboration. A developer community is also an effective and efficient instrument for exploring and solving problems together. The power of a community is its endless advantages, from knowledge sharing to support, interesting discussions, and much more. Tim Berglund invites Ale Murray (Global Community Manager...

The data mesh architectural paradigm shift is all about moving analytical data away from a monolithic data warehouse or data lake into a distributed architecture—allowing data to be shared for analytical purposes in real time, right at the point of origin. The idea of data mesh was introduced by Zhamak Dehghani (Director of Emerging Technologies, Thoughtworks) in 2019. Here, she provides an introduction to data mesh and the fundamental problems that it’s trying to solve. Zhamak des...

Note: This episode was recorded when Cluster Linking was in preview mode. It’s now generally available as part of the Confluent Q3 ‘21 release on August 17, 2021. Infrastructure needs to react in real time to support globally distributed events, such as cloud migration, IoT, edge data collection, and disaster recovery. To provide a seamless yet cloud-native, cross-cluster topic replication experience, Nikhil Bhatia (Principal Engineer I, Product Infrastructure, Confluent) and the team en...

What does a ride-hailing app that offers micromobility and food delivery services have to do with data in motion? In this episode, Ruslan Gibaiev (Data Architect, Bolt) shares about Bolt’s road to adopting Apache Kafka® and ksqlDB for stream processing to replicate data from transactional databases to analytical warehouses. Rome wasn't built overnight, nor was the adoption of Kafka and ksqlDB at Bolt. Initially, Bolt noticed the need for system standardization and replacing the unreliabl...

Monolithic applications present challenges for organizations like Saxo Bank, including difficulties when it comes to transitioning to cloud, data efficiency, and performing data management in a regulated environment. Graham Stirling, the head of data platforms at Saxo Bank and also a self-proclaimed recovering architect on the pathway to delivery, shares his experience over the last 2.5 years as Saxo Bank placed Apache Kafka® at the heart of their company—something they call a data revolution...

ksqlDB makes it easy to read, write, process, and transform data on Apache Kafka®, the de facto event streaming platform. With simple SQL syntax, pre-built connectors, and materialized views, ksqlDB’s powerful stream processing capabilities enable you to quickly start processing real-time data at scale. But how does ksqlDB work? In this episode, Michael Drogalis (Principal Product Manager, Product Management, Confluent) previews an all-new Confluent Developer course: Inside ksqlDB, where he p...

Building a large, stateful Kafka Streams application that tracks the state of each outgoing email is crucial to marketing automation tools like Mailchimp. Joining us today in this episode, Mitch Seymour, staff engineer at Mailchimp, shares how ksqlDB and Kafka Streams handle the company’s largest source of streaming data. Almost like a post office, except instead of sending physical parcels, Mailchimp sends billions of emails per day. Monitoring the state of each email can provide visib...

The best-informed business insights that support better decision-making begin with data collection, ahead of data processing and analytics. Enterprises nowadays are engulfed by data floods, with data sources ranging from cloud services, applications, to thousands of internal servers. The massive volume of data that organizations must process presents data ingestion challenges for many large companies. In this episode, data security engineer, Vitalli Rudenskyi, discusses the decision to replac...

Stream processing has become an important part of the big data landscape as a new programming paradigm to implement real-time data-driven applications. One of the biggest challenges for streaming systems is to provide correctness guarantees for data processing in a distributed environment. Guozhang Wang (Distributed Systems Engineer, Confluent) contributed to a leadership paper, along with other leaders in the Apache Kafka® community, on consistency and completeness in streaming processing in...

Using large amounts of streaming data increasingly requires interactive, real-time analytics and dashboards—and this applies to any industry, including tech. CTO and Co-Founder of Rockset Dhruba Borthakur shares how his company uses Apache Kafka® to perform complex joins, search, and aggregations on streaming data with low latencies. The Kafka database integrations allow his team to make a cloud-native analytics database that is a fundamental piece of enterprise infrastructure. Especiall...

Is it possible to have automated adoption of your event-driven architectures and microservices? The answer is yes! Alianna Inzana, product leader for API testing and virtualization at SmartBear, uses this evolutionary model to make event services reusable, functional, and strategic for both in-house needs and clients. SmartBear relies on Apache Kafka® to drive its automated microservices solutions forward through scaled architecture and adaptive workflows. Although the path to adoption m...