In 2025, real-time data moved from important to mission-critical. From billion-event pipelines to AI agents reasoning over fresh data streams, the conversations this year revealed just how fast organizations are rethinking their data infrastructure and what’s possible when data streaming becomes the foundation.

In this episode, Joseph Morais curates standout moments from the year: the stakes of real-time data, the architectural decisions behind enterprise-grade streaming, and how AI strategy is shifting toward agentic, event-driven systems. You’ll hear leaders discuss architectures designed for zero data loss, solid governance, multi-agent orchestration, and why organizations choose Confluent as the data streaming platform for data streaming at scale.

You’ll learn:

• How enterprises use Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink® to meet mission-critical guarantees like reliability and data integrity
• Why real-time pipelines matter for agentic AI and fresh-signal reasoning
• What leaders evaluate when choosing a data streaming platform
• How to prepare architectures for multi-agent systems and 2026 AI roadmaps

The Guests:

• Cosmo Wolfe, CTO, Metronome 
• Chris Kapp, Software Architect, HS1 (Henry Schein One)
• Alex Haugland , Cursor Engineer, Anysphere
• Steffen Hoellinger, Co-Founder & CEO, Airy
• Ethan Chan, Co-Founder & CEO, Allium
• Joe Pardi, Sr. Director of Global Data Engineering, Covetrus
• Rami Al Lolah, Lead Architect - Integration Center of Excellence, Swedbank
• Sean Falconer, Sr. Director, Product Management - AI Strategy, Confluent
• Jeffrey Jonathan Jennings (J3), Founder, signalRoom
• Todd Smitala, Lead Engineer, Association of Professional Flight Attendants

Guest Highlights: 
“We are processing events on a second-level latency end-to-end… it'll show up on your end customer's invoice in sub-seconds, and you're cutting users off for fraud, all done exactly once.” — Cosmo Wolfe, Metronome

“Security loves us, right? Because everything is immutable. We know who did everything and we know who can access what and who has been accessing what.” — Chris Kapp, HS1 (Henry Schein One) 

“These are not dashboards… If you want to transform your business and take a proactive approach, reacting to signals as they’re happening, you need to shift your mindset and move data responsibilities left.” — Sean Falconer, Confluent

Episode Timestamps: 
*(00:00) - Looking Back at Data Streaming in 2025
*(00:38) -  Segment 1: Unique Streaming Use Cases
*(06:05) - Segment 2: The Power of Partnerships 
*(11:23) - Segment 3: Data Streaming and Real-Time AI

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Saudi Arabia is rapidly emerging as a global AI powerhouse, a transformation fueled by a fundamental shift in how data is managed, processed, and activated. 

Mohamed Ahmed Anwar, General Manager of Presales at (sccc by stc) Saudi Cloud Computing Company, explains why they adopted Confluent’s data streaming platform: cyber resilience and security, strong governance, and scalability paired with simplified operations at enterprise scale. 

Anwar unpacks why data streaming is foundational to modern AI, from launching model-as-a-service offerings to enabling agentic architectures. He highlights how sccc by stcs strategic partnership with Confluent delivers value extending far beyond open source Apache Kafka®, including connectors,  governance with schemas, Kubernetes-based deployment, self-balancing clusters, and Cluster Linking that make enterprise operations tractable without an “army of engineers”.You’ll Learn:

• How sccc by stc uses Confluent to deliver a managed data streaming platform that powers AI use cases while maintaining performance, security, and control across public and private sectors 
• Why data governance, local compliance, and operational scalability are are critical within Saudi Arabia
• What makes real-time platforms indispensable for enhanced customer experience and operational agility
• How data streaming transforms traditional batch into dynamic, scalable AI architectures (e.g., RAG and agentic systems) by ensuring fresh, trustworthy data  

About the Guest:
Mohamed Ahmed Anwar is a seasoned technology leader with over 18 years of experience driving innovation across the IT industry. He has held leadership roles at global tech giants including Microsoft, Dell Technologies, and Pure Storage, where he led complex digital transformation initiatives with a focus on delivering business impact. Currently, he serves as the General Manager of Presales at sccc by stc, where he drives strategic efforts to empower Saudi organizations through advanced cloud services, accelerating their growth and digital modernization.

Throughout his career, Anwar has led initiatives in data analytics, cloud adoption, and artificial intelligence, enabling organizations to harness the power of emerging technologies. His passion for mentorship and team development is reflected in his dedication to nurturing talent and building resilient, future-ready teams. Anwar is driven by a belief in the transformative potential of technology, consistently working to bridge strategic vision with practical execution to deliver meaningful, lasting impact.
 

Guest Highlight: 
“Batch computing is like getting your water from a water well. You have a bucket and are governed by the size of the bucket and by the speed and the strength in your arms while in the data stream. On a streaming platform, you have a stream of data. You govern it. You know how exactly you will direct this stream of data, how you will store it and so on. This actually affected the time-to-value for our customers.”

Episode Timestamps:
1:00 — Guest introduction & company overview
5:55 — Segment 1: Data Streaming Goodness
14:05 — Segment 2: Beyond the Stream
26:50 — Segment 3: Quick Bytes
30:15 — Joseph’s Top Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink®
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• sccc by stc: https://www.youtube.com/@sccc_bystc/videos
• Joseph’s LinkedIn
• Anwar’s LinkedIn
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the heart of the expo hall at Current NOLA, this special episode drops you into the conversations, energy, and the breakthroughs as they happened.

Host, Joseph Morais, and co-host, Adi Polak talk with data streaming leaders and community voices to unpack how teams are using Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink® to power low-latency, AI-ready applications—covering patterns from usage-based billing and hybrid operations to cost efficiency and streaming governance. You’ll also hear how shift-left processing and governance make AI-ready data possible at scale. 

Plus, we break down key launches, including Queues for Kafka, Confluent Private Cloud, the Real-Time Context Engine for AI, and more.

You’ll learn:

• How modern architectures power real-time billing, entitlements, and fraud detection
• Why exactly-once processing and stateful workloads matter at scale
• How Unified Stream Manager and Confluent Private Cloud simplify hybrid, multi-cluster operations with a single pane of glass
• How Real-Time Context Engine serves governed, low-latency context to  agentic AI via MCP

The Hosts:

• Joseph Morais, Technical Champion, Confluent 
• Adi Polak, Director of Advocacy and Developer Experience Engineering, Confluent

The Guests:

• Cosmo Wolfe, CTO, Metronome 
•  Kevin Balaji, Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Confluent
• Adam Bellemare, Principal Technologist, Confluent
• Sam Barker, Principal Software Engineer, IBM
• Olena Kutsenko, Staff Developer Advocate, Confluent
• Scott Haines, O’Reilly Author and OSS Educator

Guest Highlights: 
“If your company is shifting to be more nimble with monetization and especially if you're switching to more of a consumption based model, then the underlying systems have to be real time to support that.” — Cosmo Wolfe, Metronome

“So many customers out there…they are running in Amazon and in their data center and somewhere else. They're all looking for ways to monitor and manage all these different clusters in one way.” — Kevin Balaji, Confluent 

“There's a reason we call it time travel—because we're going back to a prior point in history to replay data and do something else with it.” — Scott Haines, O’Reilly Author and OSS Educator

Episode Timestamps: 
01:00 — Cosmo Wolfe, CTO, Metronome 
17:10 —  Kevin Balaji, Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Confluent
28:40 — Adam Bellemare, Principal Technologist, Confluent
43:15 — Sam Barker, Principal Software Engineer, IBM
50:30 — Olena Kutsenko, Staff Developer Advocate, Confluent
01:05:00 — Scott Haines, O’Reilly Author and OSS Educator

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: https://www.youtube.com/@thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Adi’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/polak-adi/
• Keynote: Building Intelligent Systems on Real-time Data
• Watch Current On Demand: https://current.confluent.io/archive/2025/new-orleans?utm_source=simplecast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_id=tm.content_life-is-but-a-stream
• Context-Driven AI Reigned Supreme at Current New Orleans: https://www.confluent.io/blog/context-driven-ai-current-new-orleans/?utm_source=simplecast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_id=tm.content_life-is-but-a-stream
• Building Event-Driven Microservice (2E): https://www.confluent.io/resources/ebook/building-event-driven-microservices-2e/?utm_source=simplecast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_id=tm.content_life-is-but-a-stream
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How quickly can your business turn usage into revenue? For modern software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, speed is a competitive advantage. Metronome is redefining what’s possible with a real-time monetization engine that scales to billions of events per day—all powered by Confluent’s data streaming platform and Apache Kafka®.

In this episode, Cosmo Wolfe, CTO at Metronome, joins Joseph Morais to discuss how real-time data streaming enables everything from sub-second billing and fraud prevention to new pricing models and product-led growth. He explains how Metronome processes tens of thousands of invoices per second and billions of events per day, all while keeping 90% of their engineering team focused on building features, not managing operations. 

You’ll learn:

• How Metronome achieves second-level latency for billing and fraud detection
• Why real-time monetization requires a data streaming foundation
• How Confluent’s managed data streaming platform lets engineering teams focused on innovation, not infrastructure 
• What “time to revenue” means—and why it’s the new north star for SaaS growth

If your business depends on billing, pricing, or product usage data, this episode shows how to turn streaming into a strategic advantage.

About the Guest:
Cosmo Wolfe is the Chief Technology Officer at Metronome. He is interested in using technology to unlock data, and is experienced in building and managing web, security and identity systems and teams. Cosmo is currently reinventing billing at Metronome.

Guest Highlights: 
“We are processing events on a second-level latency end to end. So if an event occurs in your business, it’ll show up on your end customer’s invoice in sub-seconds.”

“We think of the core data infrastructure at Metronome as having two axes—time to revenue, which is basically that second-level latency, and the cardinality of data we can support.”

“When you’re making monetization a core part of your product experience, it requires really up-to-date data. And so it requires Metronome, and thus requires Confluent.”

Episode Timestamps: 
*(00:45) -  Metronome and the Importance of Real-Time Data
*(05:45) - Data Streaming Goodness
*(25:25) - Beyond the Stream
*(38:00) - Quick Bytes
*(42:35) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Metronome: @getmetronome
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Cosmo’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/cosmowolfe
• How Cursor and WarpStream Power AI Productivity: The Future of Coding: How Cursor and WarpStream Power AI Productivity | Life Is But A Stream
• Learn more at Confluent.io
• Register now for Current NOLA 2025

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Software development is changing fast. With Cursor, Anysphere is building an AI-forward IDE that fuses human creativity with machine intelligence. At the heart of this transformation is data streaming—making it possible to train models responsibly, deliver lightning-fast Tab completions, and scale telemetry without breaking engineering velocity.

In this episode, engineer Alex Haugland shares how WarpStream gives Cursor sovereignty over user data, how telemetry and accounting pipelines strengthen product decisions, and why “coding is really just a bug” in how we interact with computers. 

You’ll learn:

• Why data sovereignty and trust are critical for AI-powered products
• How WarpStream abstracts complexity while preserving control over data
• Where telemetry and accounting data streaming improve both user experience and business outcomes
• How to right-size your data stack and avoid mismatched scale

For senior leaders evaluating AI and streaming strategies, Cursor offers a blueprint for balancing innovation, cost, and trust.

About the Guest:
Alex Haugland is an engineer at Anysphere working on Cursor. He is a massive scale distributed systems performance engineer enthusiastic about understanding complex technical systems, organizational systems, and mentoring junior engineers.

Guest Highlight: 
“Our business is built on top of data, and a lot of it is data that people have been really generous to allow us to use… WarpStream lets us do that in a way where the data sits entirely inside stuff that we control and have access to. Being able to say, ‘All this stuff is locked down on S3; we have control of it,’ is really, really important to us.”

Episode Timestamps: 
*(00:45) -    Anysphere, Cursor, and Data Streaming Strategy
*(04:05) - Data Streaming Goodness
*(21:30) -  Beyond the Stream
*(32:00) - Quick Bytes
*(34:45) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• WarpStream: @WarpStreamLabs
• Cursor: @cursor_ai
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Alex’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-haugland-4ba8893b
• Learn more at Confluent.io
• Register now for Current NOLA 2025: https://current.confluent.io/new-orleans?utm_source=simplecast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=tm.content_life-is-but-a-stream

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

All AI problems are data problems—and one of the biggest is getting AI agents to talk to each other. This special episode with Sean Falconer dives into how agents built by different teams often end up stranded in “intelligence silos,” unable to collaborate or share context. The result? Fragmented AI that struggles to deliver real business value. 

Tune in to learn why moving beyond isolated AI experiments calls for a robust data streaming backbone—and how Confluent's strategic partnership with Google Cloud sets organizations up for building multi-agent AI systems at scale. With technologies like Apache Kafka®, agents can tap into a central stream of trustworthy data—effectively creating a nervous system for your AI ecosystem. That backbone enables real-time exchange, scalable collaboration, and reliable intelligence across the enterprise—unlocking speed and innovation that siloed AI can’t deliver.

About the Guest:
Sean Falconer is a Senior Director, Product Management - AI Strategy at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Sean also hosts the popular engineering podcasts Software Engineering Daily and Software Huddle. 

Guest Highlight:
“What is the message between agents? It's just data. You're moving that data from one agent system to another agent system, whether that's a multi-agent system that's collaborating or even these agents that exist in different, you know, parts of the business, you can use data streaming essentially be the bridge where those agents shared language, the shared communication becomes events.”

Episode Timestamps:
*(00:00) - Introduction
*(00:34) - Why AI is Fundamentally a Data Challenge
*(02:17) - Data Streaming: The Foundation for AI
*(07:21) - The “Island of Agents” Problem
*(09:46) - Streaming Agents vs. Chatbots
*(12:35) -  The Consequences of Disconnected Agents
*(14:09) -   The Power of Event-Driven Architecture
*(25:04) - The A2A Protocol—Google Cloud and Confluent 
*(31:19) - Model Context Protocol (MCP)
*(34:13) - Agent Development Kit (ADK)
*(37:36) - Real-World AI Use Cases
*(42:20) - Key GenAI Features on Confluent Cloud 
*(45:43) - Wrap-Up: Takeaways

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDataGiant
• Why Google’s Agent2Agent Protocol Needs Apache Kafka®
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Sean’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanf/
• Real-Time AI Agents Powered by Apache Kafka®, Apache Flink®, and Google Cloud
• Listen to podcast: https://flowsto.com/r/9BRiRRl1c
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io.

About the Show
Hosted by Joseph Morais, Life Is But A Stream is for technology leaders looking to embrace the data revolution and transform their organizations through data streaming. Instant analytics, next level customer experiences, and business innovation that was previously unimaginable: it all starts with Life Is But A Stream.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In a highly regulated industry where every millisecond matters, Swedbank is shifting its data strategy to move fast without breaking trust. In this episode, Rami Al Lolah, Lead Architect at Swedbank’s Integration Center of Excellence, shares how the bank built a future-proof foundation using Apache Kafka® with Confluent Cloud.

From early investments in building reusable data products to shift left, , Swedbank’s strategy goes beyond infrastructure. It’s about enabling interoperability, eliminating data silos, and empowering teams to think differently about how data should flow across a modern financial institution.

You’ll Learn:

• How Swedbank reduces risk by accelerating data availability across teams
• Why “shift left” is a cultural and architectural shift,not just a development pattern
• Why choose Confluent over other solutions
• Where Swedbank sees the biggest opportunities for AI and streaming in the future

Whether you're leading modernization for a financial institution or scaling real-time data for your organization, this episode offers a blueprint for transformation. 

About the Guest:
Rami Al Lolah is a seasoned professional, technologist and domain expert for 25+ years within the application and systems integration domain. His expertise is in delivering, designing, writing major integration solutions from world leading integration technology providers, leading technical/services teams, and directing major integration technical implementations. 

Guest Highlight: 
“We need to embrace the [shift left] mindset and methodology, and try to move critical considerations, for example — compliance, security, governance, and data quality earlier in the development process. This means that when teams build something like a Kafka topic, or even an API or a file based integration, they are not just focusing on making it work technically. They are already thinking about who owns it, who owns the data, what the contract, what the schemas look like, who will access this data, and how the access will be managed.”

Episode Timestamps: 
*(06:40) - Data Streaming Goodness
*(33:15) -   The Runbook: Winning Strategies
*(41:15) -    Data Streaming Street Cred
*(47:40) - Quick Bytes
*(54:30) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Rami’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ramiallolah
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Strategic partnerships don’t work without trust. And in the data streaming world, trust begins with transparency.

In this episode, Elena Cuevas, Sr. Manager of Cloud Partner Solutions Engineering at Confluent, joins Joseph Morais to unpack what it takes to collaborate with hyperscalers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. From managing competitive overlaps to future-proofing enterprise data architectures, Elena shares her battle-tested strategies for driving alignment across complex stakeholder ecosystems.

You’ll learn:

• How to collaborate effectively across competitive cloud partnerships 
• Why transparency builds trust and drives adoption in partner-led sales
• What  shift left unlocks for streaming data governance
• How Confluent supports GenAI use cases with real-time data 

Whether you're working with a cloud provider or building your own ecosystem, Elena’s playbook will change how you think about partnership, transparency, and long-term scale.

About the Guest:
Elena Cuevas currently leads the Cloud Partner Solutions Engineering team at Confluent, where she and her team focus on strengthening technical relationships with cloud providers.

Prior to joining Confluent, Elena spent several years at Google, working directly with some of the company’s largest Google Cloud customers in both pre-sales and post-sales capacities.

She is passionate about helping members of historically underrepresented communities see that a path in STEM is within reach if they choose to pursue it. Elena has served as an #IamRemarkable facilitator, an instructor for the Computer Science Summer Institute, and is a frequent speaker at universities and high schools.

Guest Highlight: 
“Sometimes we talk about competing and about one or the other, but we do better things when it's ‘and’, and not an ‘or’.”

Episode Timestamps: 
*(07:55) - Data Streaming in a World of Clouds 
*(14:25) -   The Playbook: Winning Strategies
*(23:25) -    Voices from the World of Data Streaming
*(28:30) - Quick Bytes
*(31:15) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Elena’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ecuevasc
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Blockchain may be decentralized, but reliable access to its data is anything but simple. In this episode, Ethan Chan, Co-Founder & CEO of Allium, shares how his team transforms blockchain firehoses into clean, queryable, real-time data feeds.

From the pitfalls of hosting your own data streaming infrastructure to the business advantages of Confluent Cloud, Ethan reveals the strategic decisions that helped Allium scale from 3 to nearly 100 blockchains, without burning out their engineering team.

You’ll learn:

• Why Allium opted for Confluent Cloud from day one 
• How data streaming supports mission-critical blockchain use cases
• What makes stream sharing a force multiplier for customer success
• How Confluent connectors accelerated their integrations with Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks

Whether you’re building real-time monitoring tools or reconciling petabytes of cross-chain data, this episode offers a blueprint for scaling with Apache Kafka® and Confluent.

About the Guest:

Ethan Chan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Allium. With over six years of experience in the AI and natural language processing space, Ethan has come to believe that high-quality data is the key constraint in building the best-performing models. This insight drives Allium’s mission: to provide the highest-quality blockchain data infrastructure for crypto analytics and engineering teams at institutions and funds. Allium focuses on delivering clean, reliable data in a simple, accessible format—data served on a silver platter.

Before founding Allium, Ethan was the Director of Engineering at Primer, where he founded and led the Primer Command product and team, and re-architected the core machine learning pipelines powering Primer Analyze. Earlier in his career, he lectured at Stanford University and conducted research at the Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab as a graduate student.

Guest Highlight: 
“We definitely always wanted to go for a managed service from the get-go… If you break [streaming], every other engineering company is going to complain and you become infamous—for no reason.”

Episode Timestamps: 
*(01:10) - Allium’s Data Streaming Strategy
*(05:20) - Data Streaming Goodness
*(26:50) -   The Runbook: Tools & Tactics
*(29:55) -   Data Streaming Street Cred: Improve Data Streaming Adoption 
*(32:10) - Quick Bytes
*(36:40) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Ep 8 - How Airy Powers Real-Time AI Agents with Data Streaming and Confluent
• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Ethan’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ethanyschan
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For enterprises managing sprawling systems and frequent M&A activity, data latency isn’t just inconvenient—it’s a blocker to business value. In this episode, Joe Pardi, Senior Director of Global Data Engineering at Covetrus, explains how his team replaced fragile data pipelines with a robust real-time data streaming architecture that enables instant decisions  across the entire enterprise.

The Covetrus team started with open source Apache Kafka® and then shifted to Confluent Cloud for scalability and data governance.  Joe shares the adoption has drastically reduced operational overhead, strengthened data governance, and supercharged innovation. He also emphasizes the strategic importance of data integration in post-merger scenarios and how real-time data streaming helps uncover and address data quality issues early on.

You’ll learn:

• Why Covetrus moved from self-managed Kafka to Confluent Cloud
• How real-time data streaming helps detect data quality issues faster
• What are the requirements for scaling a data architecture across hundreds of engineers
• How data streaming supports M&A integration and value creation

Whether you’re centralizing data across silos or enabling downstream systems with real-time feeds, this conversation offers a blueprint for building data streaming platforms that scale.

About the Guest:
Joe Pardi is the Senior Director of Global Data Engineering at Covetrus, a leading provider in the veterinary services industry. Based in Portland, Maine, he has held this role since January 2021, where he leads data engineering initiatives to support Covetrus' global operations.

Guest Highlight: 
“The whole key with that acquisition strategy is to unlock the value. It's easy to make an acquisition go from 1+1=2, but you're really trying to make 1+1=3… If you're going to do an M&A, you have to get really good at integrating data.”

Episode Timestamps: 
*(05:10) - Covetrus’ Data Streaming Strategy
*(06:40) - Data Challenges: Latency and Quality
*(26:05) -   The Runbook: Tools & Tactics
*(31:15) -   Data Streaming Street Cred: Improve Data Streaming Adoption 
*(38:25) - Quick Bytes
*(42:15) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Joe’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joepardi
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.