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

Happy 100th episode of Streaming Audio! Thank you to everyone who has listened, subscribed, left a review, and mostly, for sharing our passion for event streaming. We can't wait for the next 100! To celebrate, Ben Stopford (Senior Director of the Office of the CTO, Confluent) hosts an AMA (ask me anything) with Tim, covering 62 questions in total—from his career, his time at Confluent, Marvel...

Kelsey Hightower was already an advocate, just like all other developers, long before joining Google officially as a developer advocate and Kubernetes expert. Gaining trust in your product, process, and the way you develop code requires the ability to explain those things well.  Kelsey reflects on the journey that brought him to where he is today and how Kubernetes has evolved over the years too,...

If you’ve ever wondered what Apache Kafka® is, what it’s used for, or wanted to learn about Kafka architecture and all its components, buckle up! In today’s episode, Michael Noll (Principal Technologist, Confluent) and Tim Berglund (Senior Director of Developer Advocacy, Confluent) discuss a series of fundamental questions: What is Kafka? What is an event? How do we organize and store events? And...

There are two primary industries within the Internet of Things (IoT): industrial IoT (IIoT) and consumer IoT (CIoT), both of which can benefit from the Apache Kafka® ecosystem, including Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect. Kai Waehner, who works in the advanced tech group at Confluent with customers, defining their needs, use cases, and architecture, shares example use cases where he’s seen IoT integ...

Confluent Platform 5.5 is out, and Tim Berglund (Senior Director of Developer Advocacy, Confluent) is here to give you the latest updates! The first is improved schema management and Confluent Schema Registry support for Protobuf and JSON, making these components pluggable. The second is better support for languages other than Java within the sphere of librdkafka. And finally, this release include...

During his time at Twitter, Sam Ritchie (Staff Research Engineer, Google) led the development of Summingbird, a project that helped Twitter ingest and process massive amounts of data. It relieved some key pain points, saving developers at Twitter from doing work twice, as was a natural consequence of the then-current Lambda Architecture. In this episode, Sam dives teaches us some abstract algebra...

Apache Kafka® 2.5 is here, and we’ve got some Kafka Improvement Proposals (KIPs) to discuss! Tim Berglund (Senior Director of Developer Advocacy, Confluent) shares improvements and changes to over 10 KIPs all within the realm of Core Kafka, Kafka Connect, and Kafka Streams, including foundational improvements to exactly once semantics, the ability to track a connector’s active topics, and adding a...

Applications, development, deployment, and theory are all key pieces behind customer experience, event streaming, and improving systems and integration.  James Urquhart (Global Field CTO, VMware) is writing a book combining Wardley Mapping and Promise Theory to evaluate the future of event streaming and how it will become a more economic choice for users. James argues that reducing the cost of int...

There’s something about YAML and the word “Docker” that doesn’t quite sit well with Viktor Gamov (Developer Advocate, Confluent). But Kafka Streams on Kubernetes is a phrase that does. Kubernetes is an open source platform that allows teams to deploy, manage, and automate containerized services and workloads. Running Kafka Streams on Kubernetes simplifies operations and gets your environment alloc...

As the fundamental data abstractions used by developers have changed over time, event streams are now the present and the future. Coming from decades of experience in messaging, Dan Rosanova (Senior Group Product Manager for Confluent Cloud, Confluent) discusses the pros and cons of cloud event streaming services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Confluent Cloud. He also compare...

As a programmer, Kent Beck chats about various topics of broad interest to developers, including some of his books: “Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change,” “Test-Driven Development: By Example,” and “Implementation Patterns.” He wrote “Implementation Patterns” to highlight the positive habits a developer should form in order to write accessible code.  He also shares about what it’s like t...

Ask Confluent is back! From questions on Apache Kafka®, data integration, and log aggregation, to potential interview questions that Tim would ask if he were to interview himself, anything goes.  If you're already a Kafka expert (or any type of expert), think about becoming a speaker. Gwen and Tim talk through how to submit a proposal and get accepted to conferences. As experienced conference...

Domain-driven design (DDD) is helpful for managing complex processes and rules—especially those between business experts and developers/users—and turning them into models.  CEO of Virtual Genius Paul Rayner describes how the vast tooling in DDD enables developers to focus on the coding that really matters and makes systems more collaborative, taking into account three primary considerations: (1) h...

TensorFlow is an open source machine learning platform that can be used with Apache Kafka® for deep learning. Chris Mattmann, author of Machine Learning with TensorFlow, introduces us to TensorFlow as a Google technology that teaches computers how to think and make connections like humans do. For example, when there is a signifier that the mind processes, out comes a label to the object in front o...

As an engineering leader managing a team, Gwen Shapira talks through the steps she took to get to Confluent and how she got started working with Apache Kafka®. She shares about what it's like being on the Project Management Committee (PMC) for the Apache Software Foundation as well as some of the responsibilities involved, such as choosing Kafka Improvement Proposals (KIPs), monitoring releas...

Whether it's stream processing, real-time data analytics, to adding business value, Professional Services helps customers thrive within their chosen software or products and ultimately be successful as a digital enterprise. As a solutions architect and member of the Professional Services Team at Confluent, Jakub Korab discusses what Professional Services actually is and how it relates to cust...

What is Knative and how does it simplify Kubernetes-related processes through seamless extension? Jacques Chester (Software Engineer, VMware) is publishing a book called “Knative in Action” that walks through the problems Knative is trying to solve. You don’t need to be an expert to fully understand Knative, so start getting hands on and see what you can do with it! You also don't need to be...

The Stitch Fix team benefits from a centralized data integration platform at scale using Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect. Liz Bennett (Software Engineer, Confluent) got to play a key role building their real-time data streaming infrastructure. Liz explains how she implemented Apache Kafka® at Stitch Fix, her previous employer, where she successfully introduced Kafka first through a Kafka hackathon...

Jun Rao (Co-founder, Confluent) explains what relational databases and distributed databases are, how they work, and major differences between the two. He also delves into important lessons he’s learned along the way through the transition from the relational world to the distributed world.  To be successful at a place like Confluent, he outlines three fundamental traits that a distributed systems...

Learn how to write an abstract for conference submissions and call for papers with tips from Tim Berglund, chair of the Kafka Summit Program Committee. Whether you're giving a talk for the very first time or you consider yourself to be an experienced speaker, these guidelines will help you craft a strong story that stands out from the others. EPISODE LINKS Join #summit-office-hours on the Con...

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is the most played Call of Duty multiplayer of this console generation with over $1 billion in sales and almost 300 million multiplayer matches. Behind the scenes, Yaroslav Tkachenko (Software Engineer and Architect, Activision) gets to be on the team behind it all, architecting, designing, and implementing their next-generation event streaming platform, including a la...

A quick summary of new features, updates, and improvements in Confluent Platform 5.4, including Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Structured Audit Logs, Multi-Region Clusters, Confluent Control Center enhancements, Schema Validation, and the preview for Tiered Storage. This release also includes pull queries and embedded connectors in preview as part of KSQL. EPISODE LINKS Confluent Platform 5.4 R...

From previously focusing on Confluent Schema Registry to now making connectors for Confluent Cloud, Magesh Nandakumar (Software Engineer, Confluent) discusses what connectors do, how they simplify data integrations, and how they enable sophisticated customer use cases. With connectors built for Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), this hel...

One way to put Apache Kafka into action is through geofencing and tracking the location data of objects, barges, and cars in real time. Guido Schmutz (Principal Consultant, Trivadis) shares about one such use case involving a German steel company and the development project he worked on for them, which he featured in a talk at Berlin Buzzwords.  EPISODE LINKS Location Analytics – Real-Time Geofenc...

The role of monitoring hosted services is evolving, but the ability to let go of the details to get what you are paying for with SaaS has always been there. Dustin Cote (Product Manager for Observability, Confluent Cloud) talks about Apache Kafka® made serverless and how beyond just the brokers, Confluent Cloud focuses on fitting into customer systems rather than building monitoring silos.  When i...