Lena Hall joins Tim Berglund in the studio to talk about Apache Kafka®, the various ways to run Kafka on Microsoft Azure, Kafka on Kubernetes (K8s), and some exciting events that are happening in the Kafka world. 

Lena shares about serving double duty as both a senior software engineer and senior cloud developer advocate for Azure Engineering, including her unique roles and responsibilities, and how she balances engineering with advocacy. From writing tech articles to her experience with fuzzing and presence on YouTube, Lena is a strong community supporter and believes in the importance of staying rooted in the world of code as an advocate, because it helps you better understand common challenges and gives you insight as an engineer trying to fix them. It’s important to ask what's good about it and how it can be improved.

They also discuss Kubernetes, the benefits of running Kafka on Kubernetes, why it’s popular, and using systems that can integrate with it. With Confluent Operator, it’s faster to spin up new environments, as well as easier to support a larger number of clusters in addition to scaling and configuration changes. As the Kafka ecosystem continues to grow and progress, one of the most notable updates of all is KIP-500 involving ZooKeeper. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Apache Kafka on Kubernetes – Could You? Should You?
• Ask Confluent #1: Kubernetes, Confluent Operator, Kafka and KSQL
• Fuzzing, Confluent Operator, StatefulSets, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Distributed Datastores on Kubernetes (on StatefulSets) at GOTO Chicago
• Running a Distributed Database on Kubernetes on Azure
• KIP-500: Replace ZooKeeper with a Self-Managed Metadata Quorum | Podcast
• Project Springfield, the Microsoft Project that Lena worked on in regard to KIP-500
• What is Apache Kafka in Azure HDInsight
• Use Azure Event Hubs from Apache Kafka applications
• Apache Kafka based event streaming platform optimized for Azure Stack
• Confluent Platform on Azure Marketplace
• Eventually Perfect Distributed Systems: Blog | O'Reilly Velocity Keynote
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• Fully managed Apache