Confluent Developer ft. Tim Berglund, Adi Polak & Viktor Gamov

It’s the first work-from-home episode of Ask Confluent, where Gwen Shapira (Core Kafka Engineering Leader, Confluent) virtually sits down with Apache Kafka® expert Anna McDonald (Staff Technical Account Manager, Confluent) to answer questions from Twitter.  Find out Anna’s favorite Kafka Improvement Proposal (KIP), which  will start to use racially neutral terms in the Kafka community and in our c...

Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a language as elegant as Spring Boot is as a framework? In this episode of Streaming Audio, Tim Berglund talks with Josh Long, Spring developer advocate at VMware about Kotlin, about the productivity-focused language from our friends at JetBrains, and how it works with Spring Boot to make the experience leaner, cleaner, and easy to use. Josh shares how the Sprin...

Neil Buesing, an Apache Kafka® community stalwart at Object Partners, spends his days building things out of Kafka and helping others do the same. Today, he discusses the concept of a CoE (center of excellence), and how a CoE is integral to attain and sustain world-class performance, business value, and success in a business. Neil talks us through how to make a CoE successful, the importance of ev...

Ever wonder what it's like to intern at a place like Confluent? How about working with Kafka Streams and creating your own KIP? Well, that's exactly what we discuss on today's episode with Leah Thomas. Leah Thomas, who first interned as a recruiter for Confluent, quickly realized that she was enamored with the problem solving the engineering team was doing, especially with Kafka Str...

The feature-rich release of Confluent Platform 6.0, based on Apache Kafka® 2.6, introduces Tiered Storage, Self-Balancing Clusters, ksqlDB 0.10, Admin REST APIs, and Cluster Linking in preview. These features enhance the platform with greater elasticity, improved cost effectiveness, infinite data retention, and global availability so that you can simplify management operations, reduce the cost of...

Bobby Calderwood (Founder, Evident Systems) discusses event streaming, event modeling, and event-driven architecture. He describes the emerging visual language and process, how to effectively understand and teach what events are, and some of Bobby's own use cases in the field with oNote, Evident System’s new SaaS platform for event modeling. Finally, Bobby emphasizes the power of empowering a...

Did you know that a team of 900 developers at Wix is using Apache Kafka® to maintain 1,500 microservices? Tim Berglund sits down with Natan Silnitsky (Backend Infrastructure Engineer, Wix) to talk all about how Wix benefits from using an event streaming platform.  Wix (the website that’s made for building websites) is designing a platform that gives people the freedom to create, manage, and develo...

This year, Confluent turns six! In honor of this milestone, we are taking a very special moment to celebrate with Gwen Shapira by highlighting the top six things everyone should know about Apache Kafka®: Clients have metrics Bug fix releases/Kafka Improvement Proposals (KIPs) Idempotent producers and how they work Kafka Connect is part of Kafka and Single Message Transforms (SMTs) are worth not mi...

With the explosion of real-time data, Apache Kafka and event stream processing (ESP) have grown in proliferation, with event streaming technology becoming the de facto technology transforming businesses across numerous verticals. Gwen Shapira (Engineering Leader, Confluent), Ben Stopford (Senior Director, OCTO, Confluent), and Michael Noll (Principal Technologist, Confluent) meet up to talk all ab...

Jay Smith helps Google Cloud users modernize their applications with serverless eventing. This helps them focus on their code instead of managing infrastructure, as well as ultra-fast deployments and reduced server costs.  On today’s show, he discusses the definition of serverless, serverless eventing, data-driven vs. event-driven architecture, sources and sinks, and hybrid cloud with on-prem comp...

Multi-Region Clusters improve high availability in Apache Kafka®, ensure cluster replication across multiple zones, and help with disaster recovery.  Making sure users are successful in every area of their Kafka deployment, be it operations or application development for specific use cases, is what Anna McDonald (Team Lead Customer Success Technical Architect) and Mitch Henderson (Principal Custom...

All Confluent developer advocates...assemble! COVID-19 has changed the face of meetings and events, halting all in-person gatherings and forcing companies to adapt on the fly. In today's episode of Streaming Audio, the developer advocates come together to discuss how their jobs have changed during the worldwide pandemic.  Less than a year ago, this group was constantly on the road or in a pla...

Apache Kafka® 2.6 is out! This release includes progress toward removing ZooKeeper dependency, adding client quota APIs to the admin client, and exposing disk read and write metrics, and support for Java 14.  In addition, there are improvements to Kafka Connect, such as allowing source connectors to set topic-specific settings for new topics and expanding Connect worker internal topic settings. Ka...

Viktor Gamov (Developer Advocate, Confluent) returns to Streaming Audio to explain the magic of ksqlDB, ideal testing environments for ksqlDB, and the ksqlDB test runner. For those who are just starting to explore the interface, Viktor provides some tips and best practices for what to look out for too.  He also talks about the future of ksqlDB, the future of integration testing, and his favorite n...

As developers, we are good at envisioning the future state of any given system we want to build, but are we as good at telling the business how those changes positively impact the bottom line?  Lyndon Hedderly (Team Lead, Business Value Consulting, Confluent) describes his approach to business value, how to justify a new technology that you’re introducing to your company, and tips on adopting new...

Inventory management systems are crucial for reducing real-time inventory data drift, improving customer experience, and minimizing out-of-stock events. Apache Kafka®’s real-time data technology provides seamless inventory tracking at scale, saving billions of dollars in the supply chain, making modernized data architectures more important to retailers now more than ever.   In this episode, we’ll...

Apache Kafka® Committer and PMC member Matthias J. Sax explains fault tolerance, high-availability stream processing, and how it’s done in Kafka Streams. He discusses the differences between changelogging vs. checkpointing and the complexities checkpointing introduces. From there, Matthias explains what hot standbys are and how they are used in Kafka Streams, why Kafka Streams doesn’t do watermark...

Real-time stock trades, GPS location, and website click tracking are just a few industries that heavily rely on Apache Kafka®'s real-time messaging and data delivery functions. As such, Kafka's latency is incredibly important. Anna Povzner (Software Engineer, Confluent) gives you the breakdown and everything you need to know when it comes to measuring latency.  The five components of lat...

What started out as a consulting company, Camunda eventually turned into a developer-friendly, open source vendor that now focuses on workflow automation.  Bernd Ruecker, a co-founder and the chief technologist at Camunda, talks through the company's journey, how he ended up in open source, and all things automation, including how it differs from business process management and the issue of d...

We've all been affected by COVID-19 in one way or another, resulting in big changes in workplace functionality, productivity, and even our relationships within the Apache Kafka® and Confluent communities as meetings and events have needed to turn virtual.  Ale Murray (Global Community Manager, Confluent) shares interesting trends, changes in community metrics, and what we’ve done to adapt as...

Author Sam Newman catches up with Tim Berglund (Senior Director of Developer Advocacy, Confluent) in the virtual studio on what microservices are, how they work, the drawbacks of microservices, what splitting the monolith looks like, and patterns to look for.  The pair talk through Sam's book “Monolith to Microservices” chapter by chapter, looking at key components of microservices in more de...

Tim Baldridge (Senior Software Engineer, Cisco) joins us on Streaming Audio to talk about event streaming, stream processing use cases, and µKanren.  First, Tim shares about his work at Cisco related to intaking viruses, the backend, and finding new ways to process data. Later, Tim talks about interesting bank and airline use cases, as well as his time at Walmart, taking a closer look at specific...

Confluent Platform 5.5 introduces long-awaited JSON Schema and Protobuf support in Confluent Schema Registry and across other platform components.  Support for Protobuf and JSON Schema in Schema Registry provides the same assurances of data compatibility and consistency we already had with Avro, while opening up Kafka to more businesses, applications, and use cases that are built upon those data s...

Apache Kafka® is a powerful toolset for microservice architectures. In this podcast, we’ll cover how Boden, an online retail company that specializes in high-end fashion linked to the royal family, used streaming microservices to modernize their business.  Matt Simpson (Solutions Architect, Boden) shares a real life use case showing how Kafka has helped Boden digitize their business, transitioning...

Isaac Kunen (Senior Product Manager, Snowflake) and Tim Berglund (Senior Director of Developer Advocacy, Confluent) practice social distancing by meeting up in the virtual studio to discuss all things Apache Kafka® and Kafka Connect at Snowflake.  Isaac shares what Snowflake is, what it accomplishes, and his experience with developing connectors. The pair discuss the Snowflake Kafka Connector and...