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

Building a large, stateful Kafka Streams application that tracks the state of each outgoing email is crucial to marketing automation tools like Mailchimp. Joining us today in this episode, Mitch Seymour, staff engineer at Mailchimp, shares how ksqlDB and Kafka Streams handle the company’s largest source of streaming data.  

Almost like a post office, except instead of sending physical parcels, Mailchimp sends billions of emails per day. Monitoring the state of each email can provide visibility into the core business function, and it also returns information about the health of both internal and remote message transfer agents (MTAs). Finding a way to track those MTA systems in real time is pivotal to the success of the business. 

Mailchimp is an early Apache Kafka® adopter that started using the technology in 2014, a time before ksqlDB, Kafka Connect, and Kafka Streams came into the picture. The stream processing applications that they were building faced many complexities and rough edges. As their use case evolved and scaled overtime at Mailchimp, a large number of applications deviated from the initial implementation and design so that different applications emerged that they had to maintain. To reduce cost, complexity, and standardize stream processing applications, adopting ksqlDB and Kafka Streams became the solution to their problems. This is what Mitch calls, “minimizing software speciation in our software.”

It's the idea when applications evolved into multiple systems to respond to failure-handling strategies, increased load, and the like. Using different scaling strategies and communication protocols creates system silos and can be challenging to maintain.

Replacing the existing architecture that supported point-to-point communication, the new Mailchimp architecture uses Kafka as its foundation with scalable custom functions, such as a reusable and highly functional user-defined function (UDF). The reporting capabilities have also evolved from Kafka Streams’ interactive queries into enhanced queries with Elasticsearch. 

Turning experiences into books, Mitch is also an author of O’Reilly’s Mastering Kafka Streams and ksqlDB and the author and illustrator of Gently Down the Stream: A Gentle Introduction to Apache Kafka. 

EPISODE LINKS

• The Exciting Frontier of Custom ksql Functions 
• Kafka Streams 101 Course
• Mastering Kafka Streams and ksqlDB Ebook
• ksqlDB UDFs and UDADs Made Easy
• Using Apache Kafka as a Scalable, Event-Driven Backbone for Service Architectures
• The Haiku Approach to Writing Software
• Watch the video version of this podcast
• Join the Confluent Community
• Learn Kafka on Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming on Confluent Cloud
• Use PODCAST100 to get $100 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

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 

•  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. 
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.
• 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 
• 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

The best-informed business insights that support better decision-making begin with data collection, ahead of data processing and analytics. Enterprises nowadays are engulfed by data floods, with data sources ranging from cloud services, applications, to thousands of internal servers. The massive volume of data that organizations must process presents data ingestion challenges for many large companies. In this episode, data security engineer, Vitalli Rudenskyi, discusses the decision to replace a vendor security information and event management (SIEM) system by developing a custom solution with Apache Kafka® and Kafka Connect for a better data collection strategy.

Having a data collection infrastructure layer is mission critical for Vitalii and the team in helping enterprises protect data and detect security events. Building on the base of Kafka, their custom SIEM infrastructure is configurable and designed to be able to ingest and analyze huge amounts of data, including personally identifiable information (PII) and healthcare data. 

When it comes to collecting data, there are two fundamental choices: push or pull. But how about both? Vitalii shares that Kafka Connect API extensions are integral to data ingestion in Kafka. The three key components to allow their SIEM system to collect and record daily by pushing and pulling: 

1. NettySource Connector: A connector developed to receive data from different network devices to Apache Kafka. It helps receive data using both the TCP and UDP transport protocols and can be adopted to receive any data from Syslog to SNMP and NetFlow.
2. PollableAPI Connector: A connector made to receive data from remote systems, pulling data from different remote APIs and services.
3. Transformations Library: These are useful extensions to the existing out-of-the-box transformations. Approach with “tag and apply” transformations that transform data into the right place in the right format after collecting data.

Listen to learn more as Vitalii shares the importance of data collection and the building of a custom solution to address multi-source data management requirements. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Feed Your SIEM Smart with Kafka Connect
• To Pull or to Push Your Data with Kafka Connect? That Is the Question.
• Free Kafka Connect 101 Course
• Syslog Source Connector for Confluent Platform
• Join the Confluent Community
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

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 

•  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. 
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.
• 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 
• 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

Stream processing has become an important part of the big data landscape as a new programming paradigm to implement real-time data-driven applications. One of the biggest challenges for streaming systems is to provide correctness guarantees for data processing in a distributed environment. Guozhang Wang (Distributed Systems Engineer, Confluent) contributed to a leadership paper, along with other leaders in the Apache Kafka® community, on consistency and completeness in streaming processing in Apache Kafka in order to shed light on what a reimagined, modern infrastructure looks like. 

In his white paper titled Consistency and Completeness: Rethinking Distributed Stream Processing in Apache Kafka, Guozhang covers the following topics in his paper: 

• Streaming correctness challenges
• Stream processing with Kafka
• Exactly-once in Kafka Streams

For context, accurate, real-time data stream processing is more friendly to modern organizations that are composed of vertically separated engineering teams. Unlike in the past, stream processing was considered as an auxiliary system to normal batch processing oriented systems, often bearing issues around consistency and completeness. While modern streaming engines, such as ksqlDB and Kafka Streams are designed to be authoritative, as the source of truth, and are no longer treated as an approximation, by providing strong correctness guarantees. There are two major umbrellas of the correctness of guarantees: 

1. Consistency: Ensuring unique and extant records
2. Completeness: Ensuring the correct order of records, also referred to as exactly-once semantics. 

Guozhang also answers the question of why he wrote this academic paper, as he believes in the importance of knowledge sharing across the community and bringing industry experience back to academia (the paper is also published in SIGMOD 2021, one of the most important conference proceedings in the data management research area). This will help foster the next generation of industry innovation and push one step forward in the data streaming and data management industry. In Guozhang's own words, "Academic papers provide you this proof of concept design, which gets groomed into a big system."

EPISODE LINKS

• White Paper: Rethinking Distributed Stream Processing in Apache Kafka
• Blog: Rethinking Distributed Stream Processing in Apache Kafka
• Enabling Exactly-Once in Kafka Streams
• Why Kafka Streams Does Not Use Watermarks ft. Matthias Sax
• Streams and Tables: Two Sides of the Same Coin
• Watch the video version of this podcast
• Join the Confluent Community
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

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 

•  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. 
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.
• 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 
• 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

Using large amounts of streaming data increasingly requires interactive, real-time analytics and dashboards—and this applies to any industry, including tech. CTO and Co-Founder of Rockset Dhruba Borthakur shares how his company uses Apache Kafka® to perform complex joins, search, and aggregations on streaming data with low latencies. The Kafka database integrations allow his team to make a cloud-native analytics database that is a fundamental piece of enterprise infrastructure. 

Especially in e-commerce, logistics and manufacturing apps are typically receiving over 20 million events a day. As those events roll in, it is even more critical for real-time indexing to be queried with low latencies. This way, you can build high-performing and scalable dashboards that allow your organization to use clickstream and behavioral data to inform decisions and responses to consumer behavior. Typically, the data follow these steps:

1. Events come in from mobile or web apps, such as clickstream or IoT data
2. The app data is sent to the cloud
3. Data is fed into the database in real time
4. This information is shared live on a dashboard or via SaaS application embeds

For example, when working with real-time analytics in real-time databases, both need to be continuously synced for optimal performance. If the latency is too significant, there can be a missed opportunity to interact with customers on their platform. You may want to write queries that join streaming data across transactional data or historical data lakes, even for complex analytics. You always want to make sure that the database performs at a speed and scale appropriate for customers to have a seamless experience. 

Using Rockset, you can write ANSI SQL on semi-structured and schemaless data. This way, you can achieve those complex joins with low latencies. Further data is required to supplement streaming data, but it can be easily supported through supported integrations. By having a solution for database requirements that are easily integrated and provide the correct data, you can make better decisions and maximize the result. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Real-Time Analytics and Monitoring Dashboards with Apache Kafka and Rockset
• Watch the video version of this podcast
• Join the Confluent Community
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

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 

•  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. 
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.
• 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 
• 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

Is it possible to have automated adoption of your event-driven architectures and microservices? The answer is yes! Alianna Inzana, product leader for API testing and virtualization at SmartBear, uses this evolutionary model to make event services reusable, functional, and strategic for both in-house needs and clients. SmartBear relies on Apache Kafka® to drive its automated microservices solutions forward through scaled architecture and adaptive workflows. 

Although the path to adoption may be different across use case and client requirements, it is all about maturity and API lifecycle management. As your services mature and grow, so should your event streaming architecture. The data your organization collects is no longer in a silo—rather, it has to be accessible across several events. The best architecture can handle these fluctuations. Alianna explains that although the result of these requirements is an architectural pattern, it doesn’t start that way. Instead, these automation processes begin as coding patterns on isolated platforms. 

You cannot rush code development at the coding stage because you never truly know how it will work for the end system. Testing must be done at each step of the implementation to ensure that event-driven architectures work for each step and variation of the service. The code will be altered as needed throughout the trial phase. Next, the product and development teams compare what architecture you currently have to where you’d like it to be. It is all about the product and how you’d like to scale it. The tricky part comes in the trial and error of bringing on each product and service one by one. However, once your offerings and architecture are synced, you’re saving time and effort not building something new for every microservice. 

As a result of event-driven architectures, you can minimize duplicate efforts and adapt your business offerings to them as the need arises. This is a strategic step for any organization looking to have a cohesive product offering. Architecture automation allows for flexible features that scale with your event services. Once these are in place, a company can use and grow them as needed. With innovative and adaptable event-driven architectures, organizations can grow with clients and scale the backend system as required. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Exploring Event-Driven Architectures: Why Quality Matters
• Apache Kafka + Event-Driven Architecture Support in ReadyAPI
• Watch the video version of this podcast
• Join the Confluent Community
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

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 

•  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. 
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.
• 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 
• 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

Coming out of university, Patrick Neff (Data Scientist, BAADER) was used to “perfect” examples of datasets. However, he soon realized that in the real world, data is often either unavailable or unstructured. 

This compelled him to learn more about collecting data, analyzing it in a smart and automatic way, and exploring Apache Kafka® as a core ecosystem while at BAADER, a global provider of food processing machines. After Patrick began working with Apache Kafka in 2019, he developed several microservices with Kafka Streams and used Kafka Connect for various data analytics projects. 

Focused on the food value chain, Patrick’s mission is to optimize processes specifically around transportation and processing. In consulting one customer, Patrick detected an area of improvement related to animal welfare, lost revenues, unnecessary costs, and carbon dioxide emissions. He also noticed that often machines are ready to send data into the cloud, but the correct presentation and/or analysis of the data is missing and thus the possibility of optimization. As a result:

• Data is difficult to understand because of missing units
• Data has not been analyzed so far
• Comparison of machine/process performance for the same machine but different customers is missing 

In response to this problem, he helped develop the Transport Manager. Based on data analytics results, the Transport Manager presents information like a truck’s expected arrival time and its current poultry load. This leads to better planning, reduced transportation costs, and improved animal welfare. The Asset Manager is another solution that Patrick has been working on, and it presents IoT data in real time and in an understandable way to the customer. Both of these are data analytics projects that use machine learning.

Kafka topics store data, provide insight, and detect dependencies related to why trucks are stopping along the route, for example. Kafka is also a real-time platform, meaning that alerts can be sent directly when a certain event occurs using ksqlDB or Kafka Streams.

As a result of running Kafka on Confluent Cloud and creating a scalable data pipeline, the BAADER team is able to break data silos and produce live data from trucks via MQTT. They’ve even created an Android app for truck drivers, along with a desktop version that monitors the data inputted from a truck driver on the app in addition to other information, such as expected time of arrival and weather information—and the best part: All of it is done in real time.

EPISODE LINKS

• Learn more about BAADER’s data-in-motion use cases
• Read about how BAADER uses Confluent Cloud
• Watch the video version of this podcast
• Join the Confluent Community
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

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 

•  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. 
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.
• 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 
• 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

The most secure clusters aren’t built on the hopes that they’ll never break. They are the clusters that are broken on purpose and with a specific goal. When organizations want to avoid systematic weaknesses, chaos engineering with Apache Kafka® is the route to go. 

Your system is only as reliable as its highest point of vulnerability. Patrick Brennan (Principal Architect) and Tammy Butow (Principal SRE) from Gremlin discuss how they do their own chaos engineering to manage and resolve high-severity incidents across the company. But why would an engineer break things when they would have to fix them? Brennan explains that finding weaknesses in the cloud environment helps Gremlin to:

• Avoid lengthy downtime when there is an issue (not if, but when)
• Halt lost revenue that results from service interruptions
• Maintain customer satisfaction with their stream processing services
• Steer clear of burnout for the SRE team 

Chaos engineering is all about experimenting with injecting failure directly into the clusters on the cloud. The key is to start with a small blast radius and then scale as needed. It is critical that SREs have a plan for failure and then practice an intense communication methodology with the development team. This plan has to be detailed and includes precise diagramming so that nothing in the chaos engineering process is an anomaly. Once the process is confirmed, SREs can automate it, and nothing about it is random. 

When something breaks or you find a vulnerability, it only helps the overall network become stronger. This becomes a way to problem-solve across engineering teams collaboratively. Chaos engineering makes it easier for SRE and development teams to do their job, and it helps the organization promote security and reliability to their customers. With Kafka, companies don’t have to wait for an issue to happen. They can make their disorder within microservices on the cloud and fix vulnerabilities before anything catastrophic happens.

EPISODE LINKS

• Try Gremlin’s free tier
• Join Gremlin’s Slack channel
• Learn more about Girl Geek Academy
• Learn more about gardening
• Watch the video version of this podcast
• Join the Confluent Community
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

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 

•  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. 
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.
• 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 
• 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

Confluent Cloud isn’t just for public access anymore. As the requirement for security across sectors increases, so does the need for virtual private cloud (VPC) connections. It is becoming more common today to come across Apache Kafka® implementations with the latest private link connectivity option. 

In the past, most Confluent Cloud users were satisfied with public connectivity paths and VPC peering. However, enabling private links on the cloud is increasingly important for security across networks and even the reliability of stream processing. Dan LaMotte, who since this recording became a staff software engineer II, and his team are focused on making secure connections for customers to utilize Confluent Cloud. This is done by allowing two VPCs to connect without sharing their own private IP address space. There’s no crossover between them, and it lends itself to entirely secure connection unidirectional connectivity from customer to service provider without sharing IPs. 

But why do clients still want to peer if they have the option to interface privately? Dan explains that peering has been known as the base architecture for this type of connection. Peering at the core is just point-to-point cloud connections that happen between two VPCs. With global connectivity becoming more commonplace and the rise of globally distributed working teams, networks are often not even based in the same region. Regardless of region, however, organizations must take the level of security into account. Peering and transit gateways with a high level of analogy are the new baseline for these use cases, and this is where Kafka’s private links come in handy. 

Private links now allow team members to connect to Confluent Cloud instantaneously without depending on the internet. You can directly connect all of your multi-cloud options and microservices within your own secure space that is private to the company and to specific IP addresses. Also, the connection must be initiated on the client side for an increased security measure. 

With the option of private links, you can now also build microservices that use new functionality that wasn’t available in the past, such as:

Multi-cloud clusters

• Product enhancements with IP ranges
• Unlimited IP space 
• Scalability 
• Load balancing

You no longer need to segment your workflow, thanks to completely secure connections between teams that are otherwise disconnected from one another. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Securing the Cloud with VPC Peering ft. Daniel LaMotte
• Software Engineer, Cloud Networking [Remote – AMER]
• Software Engineer, Cloud Networking [Remote – USA]
• eBPF documentation
• Watch the video version of this podcast
• Join the Confluent Community
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

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 

•  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. 
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.
• 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 
• 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

Based on Apache Kafka® 2.8, Confluent Platform 6.2 introduces Health+, which offers intelligent alerting, cloud-based monitoring tools, and accelerated support so that you can get notified of potential issues before they manifest as critical problems that lead to downtime and business disruption.

Health+ provides ongoing, real-time analysis of performance and cluster metadata for your Confluent Platform deployment, collecting only metadata so that you can continue managing your deployment, as you see fit, with complete control.

With cluster metadata being continuously analyzed, through an extensive library of expert-tested rules and algorithms, you can quickly get insights to cluster performance and spot potential problems before they occur using Health+. To ensure complete visibility, organizations can customize the types of notifications that they receive and choose to receive them via Slack, email, or webhook. Each notification that you receive is aimed at avoiding larger downtime or data loss by helping identify smaller issues before they become bigger problems.

In today’s episode, Tim Berglund (Senior Director of Developer Experience, Confluent) highlights everything that’s new in Confluent Platform 6.2 and all the latest updates.

EPISODE LINKS

• Check out the release notes
• Read the blog post: Introducing Health+ with Confluent Platform 6.2
• Download Confluent Platform 6.2
• Watch the video version of this podcast
• Join the Confluent Community
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

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 

•  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. 
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.
• 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 
• 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

Collecting internal, operational telemetry from Confluent Cloud services and thousands of clusters is no small feat. Stakeholders need to rely on the same data to make operational decisions. Whether it be metrics from clusters in Confluent Cloud or traces from our internal service, they all provide valuable insights not only to engineering teams but also to customers for their own operations and for business reporting needs. Traditionally, this data needs to be collected in multiple ways to satisfy all the different requirements. We leverage third-party vendors for our operational needs, which usually means deploying vendor agents or libraries in addition to our own, as we also need to collect some of the same data to expose to customers.

However, this sometimes leads to discrepancies between various systems, which are often hard to reconcile and make it harder to troubleshoot issues across engineering, data science, and other teams.

One of the earliest software engineers at Confluent, Xavier Léauté is no stranger to this. At Confluent, he leads our observability engineering efforts in Confluent Cloud.

With OpenTelemetry, we can collect data in a vendor-agnostic way. It defines a standard format that all our services can use to expose telemetry, and it provides Go and Java libraries that we can use to instrument our services. Many vendors already integrate with OpenTelemetry, which gives us the flexibility to try out different observability solutions with minimal effort, without the need to rewrite applications or deploy new agents. This means that the same data we send to third parties can also be collected internally (in our own clusters).

The same source of data can then be leveraged in many different ways:

• Using Kafka Connect, we can send this data to our data warehouse and data science teams in real time to derive many of the metrics that we use to track the health of our cloud business
• That very same data also powers our Cloud Metrics API to provide our customers visibility into their infrastructure
• Engineers and support teams can collect more fine-grained data to troubleshoot incidents or understand low-level application behavior

We’ve also adopted the same approach for on-prem customers, which enables us to collect telemetry into our cloud and help them troubleshoot issues, leveraging the same infrastructure that we already built for Cloud. 

Regarding OpenTelemetry efforts in Apache Kafka®, we’re working on KIP-714 which will allow us to collect Kafka client metrics to help better understand client-side problems without the need to instrument client applications. Our ultimate goal has always been to migrate to OpenTelemetry, which is now underway. We’d like to make a way for direct integration with OpenTelemetry in Kafka, based on the work that we’ve done at Confluent.

EPISODE LINKS

• OpenTelemetry Twitch channel
• Confluent Cloud Metrics API
• Confluent Platform Proactive Support
• KIP-714: Client Metrics and Observability
• Watch the video version of this podcast
• Join the Confluent Community
• Learn more at Confluent Developer
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

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 

•  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. 
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.
• 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 
• 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.