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Tech on the Rocks

Reinventing Stream Processing: From LinkedIn to Responsive with Apurva Mehta

Mar 6, 2025
In this installment, Apurva Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Responsive, shares insights from his journey in stream processing at LinkedIn and Confluent. He breaks down the evolution of stream processing from simple tasks to powering complex applications. Apurva clarifies the concept of 'real time,' emphasizing low latency over instant responses. He discusses the pitfalls of traditional databases in handling high-update rates and explains how Responsive innovates by decoupling state from compute to enhance efficiency and operational simplicity.
58:13

Episode guests

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

  • Apurva Mehta shares his journey from LinkedIn to Responsive, highlighting stream processing's evolution and growing importance across industries.
  • The podcast clarifies the concept of 'real-time' processing, emphasizing low latency as a more realistic expectation for many applications.

Deep dives

Background and Career Journey in Stream Processing

The speaker describes their career trajectory, emphasizing their extensive experience in stream processing, which began around 2013 at LinkedIn. They contributed to the development of Kafka, particularly in implementing transaction capabilities, and later focused on stream processing jobs for indexing within LinkedIn's graph database and search index. At Confluent, they further honed their expertise, leading teams that developed stream processing solutions and observing the growing importance of these technologies in various industries. Their background sets the foundation for understanding the evolution of stream processing applications and the challenges that come with them.

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