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

Jason Bell (Apache Kafka® DevOps Engineer, digitalis.io, and Author of “Machine Learning: Hands-On for Developers and Technical Professionals” ) delves into his 32-year journey as a DevOps engineer and how he discovered Apache Kafka. He began his voyage in hardware technology before switching over to software development. From there, he got involved in event streaming in the early 2000s where his love for Kafka started. His first Kafka project involved monitoring Kafka clusters for flight search data, and he's been making magic ever since!

Jason first learned about the power of the event streaming during Michael Noll’s talk on the streaming API in 2015. It turned out that Michael had written off 80% of Jason’s streaming API jobs with a single talk. 

As a Kafka DevOps engineer today, Jason works with on-prem clusters and faces challenges like instant replicas going down and bringing other developers who are new to Kafka up to speed so that they can eventually adopt it and begin building out APIs for Kafka. He shares some tips that have helped him overcome these challenges and bring success to the team.

EPISODE LINKS

• Machine Learning: Hands-On for Developers and Technical Professionals by Jason Bell 
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• 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.

Multi-tenancy has been quite the topic within the Apache Kafka® community. Anna Povzner, an engineer on the Confluent team, spends most of her time working on multi-tenancy in Kafka in Confluent Cloud.

Anna kicks off the conversation with Tim Berglund (Senior Director of Developer Experience, Confluent) by explaining what multi-tenancy is, why it is worthy to be desired, and advantages over single-tenant architecture. By putting more applications and use cases on the same Kafka cluster instead of having a separate Kafka cluster for each individual application and use case, multi-tenancy helps minimize the costs of physical machines and also maintenance.

She then switches gears to discuss quotas in Kafka. Quotas are essentially limits—you must set quotas for every tenant (or set up defaults) in Kafka. Anna says it’s always best to start with bandwidth quotas because they’re better understood.

Stick around until the end as Anna gives us a sneak peek on what’s ahead for multi-tenant Kafka, including KIP-612, the addition of the connection rate quota, which will help protect brokers.

EPISODE LINKS

• Sharing is Caring: Toward Creating Self-Tuning Multi-Tenant Kafka (Anna Povzner, Confluent)
  Join the Confluent Community Slack
• 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.

Roger Hoover, one of the first engineers to work on Confluent Cloud, joins Tim Berglund (Senior Director of Developer Experience, Confluent) to chat about the evolution of Confluent Cloud, all the stages that it’s been through, and the lessons he’s learned on the way. He talks through the days before Confluent Platform was created, and how he contributed to Apache Kafka® to run it on OpenStack (the feature used to separate advertised hostnames from the internal hostnames).

The Confluent Cloud control plane is now run in over 40 regions. Under the covers, Roger and his team are managing tens of thousands of resources at the cloud provider layer. This means creating VPCs, VMs, volumes, and DNS records, to manage software artifacts, like what version of Kafka is running and user management. Confluent Cloud is a complex application and distributed system spread across the entire world, but Roger reveals how it's done.

EPISODE LINKS

• Building Confluent Cloud – Here’s What We’ve Learned 
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• 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.

Do you ever feel like you’re short on time? Well, good news! Confluent Software Engineer Matthias J. Sax is back to discuss how event streaming has changed the game, making time management more simple yet efficient. 

Matthias explains what watermarking is, the reasons behind why Kafka Streams doesn’t use them, and an alternative approach to watermarking informally called the “slack time approach.” 

Later, Matthias discusses how you can compare “stream time,” which is the maximum timestamp observed, to the watermark approach as a high-time watermark. Stick around for the end of the episode, where Matthias reveals other new approaches in the pipeline. Learn how to get the most out of your time on today’s episode of Streaming Audio!

EPISODE LINKS

• Kafka Summit talk: The Flux Capacitor of Kafka Streams and ksqlDB
• Watermarks, Tables, Event Time, and the Dataflow Model
• Kafka Streams’ Take on Watermarks and Triggers
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• 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.

What's it like being a distributed systems engineer? Apurva Mehta (Engineering Leader, Confluent) explains what attracted him to Apache Kafka®, the challenges and uniqueness of distributed systems, and how to excel in this industry. 

He dives into the complex math behind the temporal logic of actions (TLA) and shares about his experiences working at Yahoo and Linkedin, which have prepared him to be where he is today.

Apurva also shares what he looks for when hiring someone to join his team. When you're working on a system like Kafka and Kafka Streams, really understanding what your machine is doing, where the bottlenecks are, and how to design improvements to address inefficiencies is critical. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Jason Gufstason discusses TLA validation (and distributed systems engineering in general) 
• MIT Courseware on Distributed Systems 
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• 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.

It’s Halloween again, which means Anna McDonald (Staff Technical Account Manager, Confluent) is back for another spooktacular episode of Streaming Audio.

In this episode, Anna shares six of the most spine-chilling, hair-raising  Apache Kafka® JIRAs from the past year. Her job is to help hunt down problems like these and dig up skeletons like: 

• Early death causes epoch time travel
• Attack of the clones
• Missing snapshot file leads to madness
• Shrink inWriteLock time to avoid maiming cluster performance
• Older groups are forced to flatline
• Ghost segment haunts for eternity 

If JIRAs are undead monsters, Anna is practically a zombie slayer. Get a haunting taste of the horrors that she's battled with as she shares about each of these Kafka updates. Keep calm and scream on in today’s special episode of Streaming Audio!

EPISODE LINKS

• Kafka: A Modern Distributed System
• From Eager to Smarter in Apache Kafka Consumer Rebalances by Sophie Blee-Goldman
• The Magical Rebalance Protocol of Apache Kafka (Strange Loop)
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• 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.

It’s the first work-from-home episode of Ask Confluent, where Gwen Shapira (Core Kafka Engineering Leader, Confluent) virtually sits down with Apache Kafka® expert Anna McDonald (Staff Technical Account Manager, Confluent) to answer questions from Twitter. 

Find out Anna’s favorite Kafka Improvement Proposal (KIP), which  will start to use racially neutral terms in the Kafka community and in our code base, as well as answers to the following questions: 

• If you could pick any one KIP from the backlog that hasn't yet been implemented and have it immediately available, which one would you pick?
• Are we able to arrive at any formula for identifying the consumer/producer throughput rate in Kafka with the given hardware specifications (CPU, RAM, network, and disk)? 
• Does incremental cooperative rebalancing also work for general Kafka consumers in addition to Kafka Connect rebalancing?

They also answer how to determine throughput and achieve your desired SLA by using partitions. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Watch Ask Confluent #18: The Toughest Questions ft. Anna McDonald
• From Eager to Smarter in Apache Kafka Consumer Rebalances
• Streaming Heterogeneous Databases with Kafka Connect – The Easy Way
• Keynote: Tim Berglund, Confluent | Closing Keynote Presentation | Kafka Summit 2020
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• 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.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a language as elegant as Spring Boot is as a framework? In this episode of Streaming Audio, Tim Berglund talks with Josh Long, Spring developer advocate at VMware about Kotlin, about the productivity-focused language from our friends at JetBrains, and how it works with Spring Boot to make the experience leaner, cleaner, and easy to use.

Josh shares how the Spring and Kotlin teams have worked hard to make sure that Kotlin and Spring Boot are a first-class experience for all developers trying to get to production faster and safer. 

They also talk about the issues that arise when wrapping one set of APIs with another, as often arises in the Spring Framework: when APIs should leak, when they should not, and how not to try to be a better Kafka Streams when the original is working well enough. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• 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.

Neil Buesing, an Apache Kafka® community stalwart at Object Partners, spends his days building things out of Kafka and helping others do the same. Today, he discusses the concept of a CoE (center of excellence), and how a CoE is integral to attain and sustain world-class performance, business value, and success in a business. Neil talks us through how to make a CoE successful, the importance of event streaming, how to better understand streaming technologies, and how to best utilize CoE for your needs. This includes evangelizing Kafka, building a Proof of Value (PoV) with team members, defining deliverables as part of that CoE, and understanding how to implement Kafka into your organization. 

EPISODE LINKS

• EoS in Kafka: Listen up, I will only say this once! by Jason Gustafson 
• The Magical Rebalance Protocol of Apache Kafka by Gwen Shapira 
• Chair-throwing meme that was discussed at end of episode 
• Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform Reference Architecture
• Benchmark Your Dedicated Apache Kafka Cluster on Confluent Cloud
• Optimizing Your Apache Kafka Deployment
• Cluster sizing
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• 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.

Ever wonder what it's like to intern at a place like Confluent? How about working with Kafka Streams and creating your own KIP? Well, that's exactly what we discuss on today's episode with Leah Thomas. Leah Thomas, who first interned as a recruiter for Confluent, quickly realized that she was enamored with the problem solving the engineering team was doing, especially with Kafka Streams. 

The next time she joined Confluent's intern program, she worked on the Streams team and helped bring KIP-450 to life. With KIP-450, Leah started learning Apache Kafka® from the inside out and how to better address the user experience. She discusses her experience with getting a KIP approved with the Apache Software Foundation and how she dove into solving the problem of hopping windows with sliding windows instead.

EPISODE LINKS

• Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
• Confluent Careers
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• 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.