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)
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• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
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