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 Customer Success Technical Architect) are passionate about here at Confluent. In this episode, they share c...
Aug 17, 2020•43 min•Ep 115•Transcript available on Metacast 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 plane on their way to present something new about Apache Kafka and event streaming, so how has the curre...
Aug 12, 2020•42 min•Ep 114•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Kafka 2.6 also augments metrics for Kafka Streams and adds emit-on-change support for Kafka Streams, as...
Aug 06, 2020•11 min•Ep 113•Transcript available on Metacast 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 new feature among recent upgrades. EPISODE LINKS Streaming Audio episodes on ksqlDB Watch #LiveStreams...
Aug 03, 2020•40 min•Ep 112•Transcript available on Metacast 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 technologies and processes effectively. As Lyndon walks through each part of the business value frame...
Jul 27, 2020•54 min•Ep 111•Transcript available on Metacast 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 discuss how Apache Kafka allows the implementation of stateful event streaming architectures on a clou...
Jul 20, 2020•42 min•Ep 110•Transcript available on Metacast 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 watermarking, and finally, why Kafka Streams is a library and not infrastructure. EPISODE LINKS Ask Confluent...
Jul 15, 2020•54 min•Ep 109•Transcript available on Metacast 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 latency are produce time, publish time, commit time, catch-up time, and fetch time. When consumer pullin...
Jul 08, 2020•47 min•Ep 108•Transcript available on Metacast 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 diagrams. Bernd also dives into dead letter topics in Apache Kafka®, software interacting with softwar...
Jun 29, 2020•43 min•Ep 107•Transcript available on Metacast 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 a response. Ale also explains what makes a comprehensive community program and the value of community...
Jun 24, 2020•40 min•Ep 106•Transcript available on Metacast 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 detail. Sam also walks through database decomposition, integrating with new technology, and performing ...
Jun 17, 2020•40 min•Ep 105•Transcript available on Metacast 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 retail use cases and the product that Walmart used to process data streams. If you’re curious about w...
Jun 08, 2020•51 min•Ep 104•Transcript available on Metacast 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 serialization formats. Tushar Thole (Engineering Leader, Confluent) and David Araujo (Product Manager,...
Jun 01, 2020•40 min•Ep 103•Transcript available on Metacast 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 from catalogs to online sales, tracking stock, and identifying buying patterns. Matt also shares abo...
May 27, 2020•42 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast 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 some of the unique challenges and adaptations it has had to undergo, as well as the interesting histo...
May 20, 2020•32 min•Ep 101•Transcript available on Metacast 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 vs. DC, and what he looks for in a new hire, to how to nail your next conference talk. We hope you ...
May 18, 2020•47 min•Ep 100•Transcript available on Metacast 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, including what makes Kubernetes so successful. But Tim is not the only one with questions. Kelsey ask...
May 13, 2020•42 min•Ep 99•Transcript available on Metacast 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 what is Kafka Streams? Over the course of this episode, Michael covers an in-depth look into Kafka t...
May 04, 2020•49 min•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast 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 integration in action. He specifically focuses on Walmart and its real-time customer integration using th...
Apr 29, 2020•41 min•Ep 97•Transcript available on Metacast 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 includes an upgrade to ksqlDB, which expands its functionality, supports more data types, increases availab...
Apr 24, 2020•11 min•Ep 96•Transcript available on Metacast 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 and explains how it has informed his attempts to make stream processing programs easy to write in a ...
Apr 22, 2020•46 min•Ep 95•Transcript available on Metacast 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 new co-group operator to the Streams DSL. EPISODE LINKS Check out the Apache Kafka 2.5 release note...
Apr 16, 2020•10 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast 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 integration does not deter people from buying but instead encourages creativity to find more uses for in...
Apr 15, 2020•55 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast 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 allocated faster. Viktor describes what that process looks like and how Jib helps build, test, and deploy...
Apr 06, 2020•42 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast 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 compares major stream processing and messaging services: Cloud Pub/Sub vs. Azure Event Hubs vs. Confluent C...
Mar 30, 2020•34 min•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast 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 to experiment with new ideas and implement them, especially when others doubt what you're trying ...
Mar 25, 2020•55 min•Ep 90•Transcript available on Metacast 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 goers, they explain that what makes a successful talk is making sure you present for the attendee in...
Mar 24, 2020•26 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast 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) how to get better at collaborating, (2) strategic design and understanding why design really matters, ...
Mar 18, 2020•51 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast 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 of you. TensorFlow is Google's version of wrangling various technologies to help group them toge...
Mar 11, 2020•53 min•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast 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 releases, and making contributions to the community. For Gwen, part of finding Kafka was her willingness t...
Mar 04, 2020•48 min•Ep 86•Transcript available on Metacast 
