In this episode of The New Stake Makers, TC Currie is joined by Neha Narkhede, CTO and Co-founder of Confluent and one of the co-creators of Apache Kafka. 

Narkhede has a passion for streaming data, and for the pasNeha Narkhede, CTO of Confluent and one of the developers of Apache Kafkat couple of years has been working on modernizing Apache Kafka to make it cloud native.With over 60% of the the Fortune 100 relying on Apache Kafka, the service has become both popular and entrenched.  But as cloud technology is expanding, some fundamental changes were necessary to make Apache Kafka truly cloud native. Kafka sits above the operation layer and below the application layer in the stack. 

It lives in the data infrastructure layer alongside relational database and/or modern no-SQL databases, and along side data warehouses.  It provides a new foundation for data that can bring data from all those different variety of services in one place so you can consume it at a large scale, she said.

“What we know about enterprises is they want to buy the whole car,” said Narkhede. So they took a year or so to build a cloud-native, fully managed service that developers can use in the public cloud.