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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 Solution Architect, Professional Services, Confluent) built an open source solution—JulieOps—to enable a self-serve Kafka platform as a service with data governance.
JulieOps is one of the first solutions available to realize self-service for Kafka and Confluent with automation. Development, operations, security teams often face hurdles when deploying Kafka. How can a user request the topics that they need for their applications? How can the operations team ensure compliance and role-based access controls? How can schemas be standardized and structured across environments? Manual processes can be cumbersome with long cycle times. Automation reduces unnecessary interactions and shortens processing time, enabling teams to be more agile and autonomous in solving problems from a localized team level.
Similar to Terraform, JulieOps is declarative. It's a centralized agent that uses the GitOps philosophy, focusing on a developer-centric experience with tools that developers are already familiar with, to provide abstractions to each product personas. All changes are documented and approved within the change management process to streamline deployments with timely and effective audits, as well as ensure security and compliance across environments.
The implementation of a central software agent, such as JulieOps, helps you automate the management of topics, configuration, access controls, Confluent Schema Registry, and more within Kafka. It’s multi tenant out of the box and supports on-premises clusters and the cloud with CI/CD practices.
Tim and Pere also discuss the steps necessary to build a self-service Kafka with an automatic Jenkins process that will empower development teams to be autonomous.
EPISODE LINKS
SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites
Artwork by Phil Vo
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 does it work with Kafka and brokers? Robin explains that Kafka Connect is a Kafka API that runs separately from the Kafka brokers, running on its own Java virtual machine (JVM) process known as the Kafka Connect worker. Kafka Connect is essential for streaming data from different sources into Kafka and from Kafka to various targets. With Connect, you don’t have to write programs using Java and instead specify your pipeline using configuration. Kafka Connect.
As a pluggable framework, Kafka Connect has a broad set of more than 200 different connectors available on Confluent Hub, including but not limited to:
Robin and Tim also discuss single message transform (SMTs), as well as distributed and standalone deployment modes Kafka Connect. Tune in to learn more about Kafka Connect, and get a preview of the Kafka Connect 101 course.
EPISODE LINKS
SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites
Artwork by Phil Vo
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 part of the Platform team, which designed a cluster management rollout service—capable of automating cluster rollout and generating rollout plans that streamline Kafka operations in the cloud. The pre-existing manual process worked well in scenarios involving just a couple hundred clusters, but with growth and the need to upgrade a significantly larger cluster fleet to target versions in the cloud, the process needed to be automated in order to accelerate feature releases while ensuring security. Under the mentorship of Pablo Berton (Staff Software Engineer I, Product Infrastructure, Confluent), Nikhil Bhatia (Principal Engineer I, Product Infrastructure, Confluent), and Vaibhav Desai (Staff Software Engineer I, Confluent), Twesha supported the design of the rollouts management process from scratch.
Twesha’s 12-week internship helped her learn more about software architecture and the design process that goes into software as a service and beyond. Not only did she acquire new skills and knowledge, but she also met mentors who are willing to teach, share their experiences, and help her succeed along the way.
Tim and Twesha also talk about the importance of asking questions during internships for the best learning experience, in addition to discussing the Vert.x, Java, Spring, and Kubernetes APIs.
EPISODE LINKS
SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites
Artwork by Phil Vo
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 yet. One of the major features in Kafka 3.0 is the efficiency for KRaft controllers and brokers to store, load, and replicate snapshots into a Kafka cluster for metadata topic partitioning. The Kafka controller is now responsible for generating a Kafka producer ID in both ZooKeeper and KRaft, easing the transition from ZooKeeper to KRaft on the Kafka 3.X version line. This update also moves us closer to the ZooKeeper-to-KRaft bridge release. Additionally, this release includes metadata improvements, exactly-once semantics, and KRaft reassignments.
To enable a stronger record delivery guarantee, Kafka producers turn on by default idempotency, together with acknowledgment delivery by all the replicas. This release also comprises enhancements to Kafka Connect task restarts, Kafka Streams timestamp based synchronization and more flexible configuration options for MirrorMaker2 (MM2). The first version of MirrorMaker has been deprecated, and MirrorMaker2 will be the focus for future developments. Besides that, this release drops support for older message formats, V0 and V1, as well as initiates the removal of Java 8 and Scala 2.12 across all components in Apache Kafka. The universal Java 8 and Scala 2.12 deprecation is anticipated to complete in the future Apache Kafka 4.0 release.
Apache Kafka 3.0 is a major release and step forward for the Apache Kafka project!
EPISODE LINKS
SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites
Artwork by Phil Vo
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, Confluent) and Robin Moffatt (Staff Developer Advocate, Confluent) on the show to discuss the art of Q&A in a global community, share tips for building a vibrant developer community, and highlight the five strategic pillars for running a successful global community:
Digital platforms, such as a community Slack and forum, often consist of members who are well versed on topics of interest. As a leader in the Apache Kafka® and Confluent communities, Robin expresses the importance of being respectful when asking questions and providing details to the problem at hand. A well-formulated and focused question will more likely lead to a helpful answer. Oftentimes, the cognitive process of composing the question actually helps iron out the problem and draw out a solution. This process is also known as the rubber duck debugging theory.
In a global community with diverse cultures and languages, being kind and having empathy is crucial. The tone and meaning of words can sometimes get lost in translation. Using emojis can help transcend language barriers by adding another layer of tone to plain text.
Ale and Robin also discuss the pros and cons of a community forum vs. a Slack group. Tune in to find out more tips and best practices on building and engaging a developer community.
EPISODE LINKS
SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites
Artwork by Phil Vo
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 describes that the complexity and ambition to use data have grown in today’s industry. But what is data mesh? For over half a century, we’ve been trying to democratize data to deliver value and provide better analytic insights. With the ever-growing number of distributed domain data sets, diverse information arrives in increasing volumes and with high velocity. To remove the friction and serve the requirement for data to be consumed by operational needs in various use cases, the best way is to mesh the data. This means connecting data through a peer-to-peer fashion and liberating data for analytics, machine learning, serving up data-intensive applications across the organization, and more. Data mesh tackles the deficiency of the traditional, centralized data lake and data warehouse platform architecture.
The data mesh paradigm is founded on four principles:
A decentralized, agnostic data structure enables you to synthesize data and innovate. The starting point is embracing the ideology that data can be anywhere. Source-aligned data should serve as a product available for people across the organization to combine, explore, and drive actionable insights. Zhamak and Tim also discuss the next steps we need to take in order to bring data mesh to life at the industry level.
To learn more about the topic, you can visit the all-new Confluent Developer course: Data Mesh 101. Confluent Developer is a single destination with resources to begin your Kafka journey.
EPISODE LINKS
SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites
Artwork by Phil Vo
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 engineered a solution called Cluster Linking. Available on Confluent Cloud, Cluster Linking is an API that enables Apache Kafka® to work across multi-datacenters, making it possible to design globally available distributed systems.
As industries adopt multi-cloud usage and depart from on-premises and single cluster operations, we need to rethink how clusters operate across regions in the cloud. Cluster Linking as an inter-cluster replication layer into Confluent Server, allowing you to connect clusters together and replicate topics asynchronously without the need for Connect.
Cluster Linking requires zero external components when moving messages from one cluster to another. It replicates data into its destination by partition and byte for byte, preserving offsets from the source cluster. Different from Confluent Replicator and MirrorMaker2, Cluster Linking simplifies failover in high availability and disaster recovery scenarios, improving overall efficiency by avoiding recompression. As a great cost-effective alternative to Multi-Region Cluster, Cluster Linking reduces traffic between data centers and enables inter-cluster replication without the need to deploy and manage a separate Connect cluster.
With low recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO), Cluster Linking enables scenarios such as:
Find out more about Cluster Linking architecture and set your data in motion with global Kafka.
EPISODE LINKS
SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites
Artwork by Phil Vo
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 unreliable query-based change data capture (CDC) process. As an experienced Kafka developer, Ruslan believed that Kafka is the solution for adopting change data capture as a company-wide event streaming solution. Persuading the team at Bolt to adopt and buy in was hard at first, but Ruslan made it possible. Eventually, the team replaced query-based CDC with log-based CDC from Debezium, built on top of Kafka. Shortly after the implementation, developers at Bolt began to see precise, correct, and real-time data.
As Bolt continues to grow, they see the need to implement a data lake or a data warehouse for OTP system data replication and stream processing. After carefully considering several different solutions and frameworks such as ksqlDB, Apache Flink®, Apache Spark™, and Kafka Streams, ksqlDB shines most for their business requirement.
Bolt adopted ksqlDB because it is native to the Kafka ecosystem, and it is a perfect fit for their use case. They found ksqlDB to be a particularly good fit for replicating all their data to a data warehouse for a number of reasons, including:
Turn in to find out more about Bolt’s adoption journey with Kafka and ksqlDB.
EPISODE LINKS
SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites
Artwork by Phil Vo
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.
Before adopting Kafka, Saxo Bank encountered scalability problems. They previously relied on a centralized data engineering team, using the database as an integration point and looking to their data warehouse as the center of the analytical universe. However, this needed to evolve. For a better data strategy, Graham turned his attention towards embracing a data mesh architecture:
Data mesh was first defined by Zhamak Dehghani in 2019, as a type of data platform architecture paradigm and has now become an integral part of Saxo Bank’s approach to data in motion.
Using a combination of Kafka GitOps, pipelines, and metadata, Graham intended to free domain teams from having to think about the mechanics, such as connector deployment, language binding, style guide adherence, and data handling of personally identifiable information (PII).
To reduce operational complexity, Graham recognized the importance of using Confluent Schema Registry as a serving layer for metadata. Saxo Bank authored schemes with Avro IDL for composability and standardization and later made a switch over to Uber’s Buf for strongly typed metadata. A further layer of metadata allows Saxo Bank to define FpML-like coding schemes to specify information classification, reference external standards, and link semantically related concepts.
By embarking on the data mesh operating model, Saxo Bank scales data processing in a way that was previously unimaginable, allowing them to generate value sustainably and to be more efficient with data usage.
Tune in to this episode to learn more about the following:
EPISODE LINKS
SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites
Artwork by Phil Vo
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 provides a full overview of ksqlDB’s internal architecture and delves into advanced ksqlDB features.
When it comes to ksqlDB or Kafka Streams, there’s one principle to keep in mind: ksqlDB and Kafka Streams share a runtime. ksqlDB runs its SQL queries by dynamically writing Kafka Streams typologies. Leveraging Confluent Cloud makes it even easier to use ksqlDB.
Once you are familiar with ksqlDB’s basic design, you’ll be able to troubleshoot problems and build real-time applications more effectively.
The Inside ksqlDB course is designed to help you advance in ksqlDB and Kafka. Paired with hands-on exercises and ready-to-use codes, the course covers topics including:
Michael also sheds light on ksqlDB’s roadmap:
Tune in to this episode to find out more about the Inside ksqlDB course on Confluent Developer. The all-new website provides diverse and comprehensive resources for developers looking to learn about Kafka and Confluent. You’ll find free courses, tutorials, getting started guides, quick starts for 60+ event streaming patterns, and more—all in a single destination.
EPISODE LINKS
SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites
Artwork by Phil Vo
From the publisher's feed
Hi, we’re Tim Berglund, Adi Polak, and Viktor Gamov and we’re excited to bring you the Confluent Developer podcast (formerly “Streaming Audio.”) Our hand-crafted weekly episodes feature in-depth…
Whether you’re a seasoned open source data streaming engineer, or just someone who’s interested in learning more about Apache Kafka®, Apache Flink® and real-time data, we hope you’ll appreciate the stories, the discussion, and our effort to bring you a high-quality show worth your time.

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