

Confluent Developer ft. Tim Berglund, Adi Polak & Viktor Gamov
Confluent
Hi, we’re Tim Berglund, Adi Polak, and Viktor Gamov and we’re excited to bring you the Confluent Developer podcast (formerly “Streaming Audio.”) Our hand-crafted weekly episodes feature in-depth interviews with our community of software developers (actual human beings - not AI) talking about some of the most interesting challenges they’ve faced in their careers. We aim to explore the conditions that gave rise to each person’s technical hurdles, as well as how their experiences transformed their understanding and approach to building systems. Whether you’re a seasoned open source data streaming engineer, or just someone who’s interested in learning more about Apache Kafka®, Apache Flink® and real-time data, we hope you’ll appreciate the stories, the discussion, and our effort to bring you a high-quality show worth your time.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Dec 16, 2020 • 48min
Choreographing the Saga Pattern in Microservices ft. Chris Richardson
Chris Richardson, creator of the original Cloud Foundry, maintainer of microservices.io and author of “Microservices Patterns,” discovered cloud computing in 2006 during an Amazon talk about APIs for provisioning servers. At this time, you could provision 20 servers and pay 10 cents per hour. This blew his mind and led him in 2008 to create the original Cloud Foundry, a PaaS for deploying Java applications on EC2.One of the original Cloud Foundry’s earliest success stories was a digital marketing agency for a beer company that ran a campaign around the Super Bowl. Cloud Foundry actually enabled them to deploy an application on AWS and then adjust its capacity based on the load. They were leveraging the elasticity of the cloud back in the ‘08–‘09 timeframe. SpringSource eventually acquired Cloud Foundry, followed by VMware. It's the origin of the name of today's Cloud Foundry.Later in the show, Chris explains what choreographed sagas are, reasons to leverage them, and how to measure their efficacy.EPISODE LINKSThe microservices pattern languageEventuate frameworkBook: The Art of ScalabilityUse podcon19 to get 40% off Microservices Patterns by Chris RichardsonJoin the Confluent Community SlackLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent CloudUse 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.

Dec 7, 2020 • 43min
Apache Kafka and Porsche: Fast Cars and Fast Data ft. Sridhar Mamella
We have all heard of Porsche, but did you know that Porsche utilizes event streaming with Apache Kafka®? Today, Sridhar Mamella (Platform Manager, Data Streaming Platforms, Porsche) discusses how Kafka’s event streaming technology powers Porsche through Streamzilla.With the modern Porsche car having 150–200 sensors, Sridhar dives into what Streamzilla is and how it functions with Kafka on premises and in the cloud. He reveals how the first months of event streaming in production went, Porsche’s path to the cloud, Streamzilla's learnings from a developer and a business perspective, and plans for parts of Streamzilla to go open source.Stick around through the end as Sridhar talks through cloud migration, cloud-first strategy, and Porsche’s event streaming use cases. This Streaming Audio is all about speed—fast cars and fast data, an episode you won't want to miss!EPISODE LINKSWhy Software Is Eating the WorldEvery Company Is Becoming SoftwareTaycan Models at Porsche Join the Confluent Community SlackLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent CloudUse 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.

Dec 2, 2020 • 1h
Tales from the Frontline of Apache Kafka DevOps ft. Jason Bell
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 LINKSMachine Learning: Hands-On for Developers and Technical Professionals by Jason Bell Join the Confluent Community SlackLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent CloudUse 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.

Nov 23, 2020 • 44min
Multi-Tenancy in Apache Kafka ft. Anna Pozvner
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 LINKSSharing is Caring: Toward Creating Self-Tuning Multi-Tenant Kafka (Anna Povzner, Confluent)Join the Confluent Community SlackLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent CloudUse 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.

Nov 18, 2020 • 50min
Distributed Systems Engineering with Apache Kafka ft. Roger Hoover
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 LINKSBuilding Confluent Cloud – Here’s What We’ve Learned Join the Confluent Community SlackLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent CloudUse 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.

Nov 12, 2020 • 52min
Why Kafka Streams Does Not Use Watermarks ft. Matthias J. Sax
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 LINKSKafka Summit talk: The Flux Capacitor of Kafka Streams and ksqlDBWatermarks, Tables, Event Time, and the Dataflow ModelKafka Streams’ Take on Watermarks and TriggersJoin the Confluent Community SlackLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent CloudUse 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.

Nov 2, 2020 • 49min
Distributed Systems Engineering with Apache Kafka ft. Apurva Mehta
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 LINKSJason Gufstason discusses TLA validation (and distributed systems engineering in general) MIT Courseware on Distributed Systems Join the Confluent Community SlackLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent CloudUse 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.

Oct 28, 2020 • 52min
Most Terrifying Apache Kafka JIRAs of 2020 ft. Anna McDonald
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 travelAttack of the clonesMissing snapshot file leads to madnessShrink inWriteLock time to avoid maiming cluster performanceOlder groups are forced to flatlineGhost 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 LINKSKafka: A Modern Distributed SystemFrom Eager to Smarter in Apache Kafka Consumer Rebalances by Sophie Blee-GoldmanThe Magical Rebalance Protocol of Apache Kafka (Strange Loop)Join the Confluent Community SlackLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent CloudUse 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.

Oct 21, 2020 • 34min
Ask Confluent #18: The Toughest Questions ft. Anna McDonald
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 LINKSWatch Ask Confluent #18: The Toughest Questions ft. Anna McDonaldFrom Eager to Smarter in Apache Kafka Consumer RebalancesStreaming Heterogeneous Databases with Kafka Connect – The Easy WayKeynote: Tim Berglund, Confluent | Closing Keynote Presentation | Kafka Summit 2020Join the Confluent Community SlackLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent CloudUse 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.

Oct 21, 2020 • 51min
Joining Forces with Spring Boot, Apache Kafka, and Kotlin ft. Josh Long
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 LINKSJoin the Confluent Community SlackLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent CloudUse 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.


