

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

Feb 1, 2023 • 50min
How to use OpenTelemetry to Trace and Monitor Apache Kafka Systems
How can you use OpenTelemetry to gain insight into your Apache Kafka® event systems? Roman Kolesnev, Staff Customer Innovation Engineer at Confluent, is a member of the Customer Solutions & Innovation Division Labs team working to build business-critical OpenTelemetry applications so companies can see what’s happening inside their data pipelines. In this episode, Roman joins Kris to discuss tracing and monitoring in distributed systems using OpenTelemetry. He talks about how monitoring each step of the process individually is critical to discovering potential delays or bottlenecks before they happen; including keeping track of timestamps, latency information, exceptions, and other data points that could help with troubleshooting.Tracing each request and its journey to completion in Kafka gives companies access to invaluable data that provides insight into system performance and reliability. Furthermore, using this data allows engineers to quickly identify errors or anticipate potential issues before they become significant problems. With greater visibility comes better control over application health - all made possible by OpenTelemetry's unified APIs and services.As described on the OpenTelemetry.io website, "OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project. Formed through a merger of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects." It provides a vendor-agnostic way for developers to instrument their applications across different platforms and programming languages while adhering to standard semantic conventions so the traces/information can be streamed to compatible systems following similar specs.By leveraging OpenTelemetry, organizations can ensure their applications and systems are secure and perform optimally. It will quickly become an essential tool for large-scale organizations that need to efficiently process massive amounts of real-time data. With its ability to scale independently, robust analytics capabilities, and powerful monitoring tools, OpenTelemetry is set to become the go-to platform for stream processing in the future.Roman explains that the OpenTelemetry APIs for Kafka are still in development and unavailable for open source. The code is complete and tested but has never run in production. But if you want to learn more about the nuts and bolts, he invites you to connect with him on the Confluent Community Slack channel. You can also check out Monitoring Kafka without instrumentation with eBPF - Antón Rodríguez to learn more about a similar approach for domain monitoring.EPISODE LINKSOpenTelemetry java instrumentationOpenTelemetry collectorDistributed Tracing for Kafka with OpenTelemetryMonitoring Kafka without instrumentation with eBPFKris Jenkins' TwitterSEASON 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.

Jan 26, 2023 • 47min
What is Data Democratization and Why is it Important?
Data democratization allows everyone in an organization to have access to the data they need, and the necessary tools needed to use this data effectively. In short, data democratization enables better business decisions. In this episode, Rama Ryali, a Senior IT and Data Executive, chats with Kris Jenkins about the importance of data democratization in modern systems.Rama explains that tech has unprecedented control over data and ignores basic business needs. Tech’s influence has largely gone unchecked and has led to a disconnect that often forces businesses to hire outside vendors for help turning their data into information they can use. In his role at RightData, Rama worked closely with Marketing, Sales, Customers, and Leadership to develop a no-code unified data platform that is accessible to everyone and fosters data democratization.So what is data democracy anyway? Rama explains that data democratization is the process of making data more accessible and open to a wider audience in a unified, no-code UI. It involves making sure that data is available to people who need it, regardless of their technical expertise or background. This enables businesses to make data-driven decisions faster and reduces the costs associated with acquiring, processing, and storing information. In addition, by allowing more people access to data, organizations can better collaborate and access tools that allow them to gain valuable insights into their operations and gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.In a perfect world, complicated tools supported by SQL, Excel, etc., with static views of data, will be replaced by a UI that anyone can use to analyze real-time streaming data. Kris coined a phase, “data socialization,” which describes the way that these types of tools can enable human connections across all areas of the organization, not just tech.Rama acknowledges that Excel, SQL, and other dev-heavy platforms will never go away, but the future of data democracy will allow businesses to unlock the maximum value of data through an iterative, democratic process where people talk about what the data is, what matters to other people, and how to transmit it in a way that makes sense.EPISODE LINKSRightData LinkedInThe 5 W’s of Metadata by Rama RyaliReal-Time Machine Learning and Smarter AI with Data StreamingWatch the video version of this podcastKris Jenkins’ TwitterStreaming Audio Playlist Join the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperSEASON 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.

9 snips
Jan 19, 2023 • 31min
Git for Data: Managing Data like Code with lakeFS
Is it possible to manage and test data like code? lakeFS is an open-source data version control tool that transforms object storage into Git-like repositories, offering teams a way to use the same workflows for code and data. In this episode, Kris sits down with guest Adi Polak, VP of DevX at Treeverse, to discuss how lakeFS can be used to facilitate better management and testing of data.At its core, lakeFS provides teams with better data management. A theoretical data engineer on a large team runs a script to delete some data, but a bug in the script accidentally deletes a lot more data than intended. Application engineers can checkout the main branch, effectively erasing their mistakes, but without a tool like lakeFS, this data engineer would be in a lot of trouble.Polak is quick to explain that lakeFS isn’t built on Git. The source code behind an application is usually a few dozen mega bytes, while lakeFS is designed to handle petabytes of data; however, it does use Git-like semantics to create and access versions so adoption is quick and simple.Another big challenge that lakeFS helps teams tackle is reproducibility. Troubleshooting when and where a corruption in the data first appeared can be a tricky task for a data engineer, when data is constantly updating. With lakeFS, engineers can refer to snapshots to see where the product was corrupted, and rollback to that exact state.lakeFS also assists teams with reprocessing of historical data. With lakeFS data can be reprocessed on an isolated branch, before merging, to ensure the reprocessed data is exposed atomically. It also makes it easier to access the different versions of reprocessed data using any tag or a historical commit ID.Tune in to hear more about the benefits of lakeFS.EPISODE LINKSAdi Polak's TwitterlakeFS Git-for-data GitHub repo What is a Merkle Tree?If Streaming Is the Answer, Why Are We Still Doing Batch?Current 2022 sessions and slidesSign up for updates on Current 2023Watch the video version of this podcastKris Jenkins’ TwitterStreaming Audio Playlist Join the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Intro to Event-Driven Microservices with ConfluentSEASON 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.

Jan 12, 2023 • 51min
Using Kafka-Leader-Election to Improve Scalability and Performance
How does leader election work in Apache Kafka®? For the past 2 ½ years, Adithya Chandra, Staff Software Engineer at Confluent, has been working on Kafka scalability and performance, specifically partition leader election. In this episode, he gives Kris Jenkins a deep dive into the power of leader election in Kafka replication, why we need it, how it works, what can go wrong, and how it's being improved.Adithya explains that you can configure a certain number of replicas to be distributed across Kafka brokers and then set one of them as the elected leader - the others become followers. This leader-based model proves efficient because clients only have to write to the leader, who handles the replication process internally.But what happens when a broker goes offline, when a replica reassignment occurs, or when a broker shuts down? Adithya explains that when these triggers occur, one of the followers becomes the elected leader, and all the other replicas take their cue from the new leader. This failover reassignment ensures that messages are replicated effectively and efficiently with multiple copies across different brokers.Adithya explains how you can select a broker as the preferred election leader. The preferred leader then becomes the new leader in failure events. This reduces latency and ensures messages consistently write to the same broker for easier tracking and debugging.Leader failover cannot cover all failures, Adithya says. If a broker can’t be reached externally but can talk to other brokers in the cluster, leader failover won’t be triggered. If a broker experiences transient disk or network issues, the leader election process might fail, and the broker will not be elected as a leader. In both cases, manual intervention is required.Leadership priority is an important feature of Confluent Cloud that allows you to prioritize certain brokers over others and specify which broker is most likely to become the leader in case of a failover. This way, we can prioritize certain brokers to ensure that the most reliable broker handles more important and sensitive replication tasks. Additionally, this feature ensures that replication remains consistent and available even in an unexpected failure event.Improvements to this component of Kafka will enable it to be applied to a wide variety of scenarios. On-call engineers can use it to mitigate single-broker performance issues while debugging. Network and storage health solutions can use it to prioritize brokers. Adithya explains that preferred leader election and leadership failover ensure data is available and consistent during failure scenarios so that Kafka replication can run smoothly and efficiently.EPISODE LINKSData Plane: Replication ProtocolOptimizing Cloud-Native Apache Kafka Performance ft. Alok Nikhil and Adithya ChandraSEASON 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.

Jan 5, 2023 • 39min
Real-Time Machine Learning and Smarter AI with Data Streaming
Are bad customer experiences really just data integration problems? Can real-time data streaming and machine learning be democratized in order to deliver a better customer experience? Airy, an open-source data-streaming platform, uses Apache Kafka® to help business teams deliver better results to their customers. In this episode, Airy CEO and co-founder Steffen Hoellinger explains how his company is expanding the reach of stream-processing tools and ideas beyond the world of programmers.Airy originally built Conversational AI (chatbot) software and other customer support products for companies to engage with their customers in conversational interfaces. Asynchronous messaging created a large amount of traffic, so the company adopted Kafka to ingest and process all messages & events in real time.In 2020, the co-founders decided to open source the technology, positioning Airy as an open source app framework for conversational teams at large enterprises to ingest and process conversational and customer data in real time. The decision was rooted in their belief that all bad customer experiences are really data integration problems, especially at large enterprises where data often is siloed and not accessible to machine learning models and human agents in real time.(Who hasn’t had the experience of entering customer data into an automated system, only to have the same data requested eventually by a human agent?)Airy is making data streaming universally accessible by supplying its clients with real-time data and offering integrations with standard business software. For engineering teams, Airy can reduce development time and increase the robustness of solutions they build.Data is now the cornerstone of most successful businesses, and real-time use cases are becoming more and more important. Open-source app frameworks like Airy are poised to drive massive adoption of event streaming over the years to come, across companies of all sizes, and maybe, eventually, down to consumers.EPISODE LINKSLearn how to deploy Airy Open Source - or sign up for an Airy Cloud test instanceGoogle Case Study about Airy & TEDi, a 2,000 store retailerBecome an Expert in Conversational EngineeringSupercharging conversational AI with human agent feedback loopsIntegrating all Communication and Customer Data with Airy and ConfluentHow to Build and Deploy Scalable Machine Learning in Production with Apache KafkaSEASON 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 28, 2022 • 31min
The Present and Future of Stream Processing
The past year saw new trends emerge in the world of data streaming technologies, as well as some unexpected and novel use cases for Apache Kafka®. New reflections on the future of stream processing and when companies should adopt microservice architecture inspired several talks at this year’s industry conferences. In this episode, Kris is joined by his colleagues Danica Fine, Senior Developer Advocate, and Robin Moffatt, Principal Developer Advocate, for an end-of-year roundtable on this year’s developments and what they want to see in the year to come.Robin and Danica kick things off with a discussion of the year’s memorable conferences. Talk submissions for Kafka Summit London and Current 2022 featuring topics were noticeably more varied than previous years, with fewer talks focused on the basics of Kafka implementation. Many abstracts featured interesting and unusual use cases, in addition to detailed explanations on what went wrong and how others could avoid the same issues.The conferences also made clear that a lot of companies are adopting or considering stream-processing solutions. Are we close to a future where streaming is a part of everything we do? Is there anything helping streaming become more mainstream? Will stream processing replace batch?On the other hand, a lot of in-demand talks focused on the importance of understanding the best practices supporting data mesh and understanding the nuances of the system and configurations. Danica identifies this as her big hope for next year: No more Kafka developers pursuing quick fixes. “No more band aid fixes. I want as many people as possible to understand the nuances of the levers that they're pulling for Kafka, whatever project they're building.”Kris and Robin agree that what will make them happy in 2023 is seeing broader, more diverse client libraries for Kafka. “Getting away from this idea that Kafka is largely a Java shop, which is nonsense, but there is that perception.”Streaming Audio returns in January 2023.EPISODE LINKSPut Your Data To Work: Top 5 Data Technology Trends for 2023Write What You Know: Turning Your Apache Kafka Knowledge into a Technical TalkCommon Apache Kafka Mistakes to AvoidPractical Data Pipeline: Build a Plant Monitoring System with ksqlDBIf Streaming Is the Answer, Why Are We Still Doing Batch?View sessions and slides from Current 2022Watch the video version of this podcastKris Jenkins’ TwitterSEASON 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 21, 2022 • 1h 11min
Top 6 Worst Apache Kafka JIRA Bugs
Entomophiliac, Anna McDonald (Principal Customer Success Technical Architect, Confluent) has seen her fair share of Apache Kafka® bugs. For her annual holiday roundup of the most noteworthy Kafka bugs, Anna tells Kris Jenkins about some of the scariest, most surprising, and most enlightening corner cases that make you ask, “Ah, so that’s how it really works?”She shares a lot of interesting details about how batching works, the replication protocol, how Kafka’s networking stack dances with Linux’s one, and which is the most important Scala class to read, if you’re only going to read one.In particular, Anna gives Kris details about a bug that he’s been thinking about lately – sticky partitioner (KAFKA-10888). When a Kafka producer sends several records to the same partition at around the same time, the partition can get overloaded. As a result, if too many records get processed at once, they can get stuck causing an unbalanced workload. Anna goes on to explain that the fix required keeping track of the number of offsets/messages written to each partition, and then batching to force more balanced distributions.She found another bug that occurs when Kafka server triggers TCP Congestion Control in some conditions (KAFKA-9648). Anna explains that when Kafka server restarts and then executes the preferred replica leader, lots of replica leaders trigger cluster metadata updates. Then, all clients establish a server connection at the same time that lots TCP requests are waiting in the TCP sync queue.The third bug she talks about (KAFKA-9211), may cause TCP delays after upgrading…. Oh, that’s a nasty one. She goes on to tell Kris about a rare bug (KAFKA-12686) in Partition.scala where there’s a race condition between the handling of an AlterIsrResponse and a LeaderAndIsrRequest. This rare scenario involves the delay of AlterIsrResponse when lots of ISR and leadership changes occur due to broker restarts.Bugs five (KAFKA-12964) and six (KAFKA-14334) are no better, but you’ll have to plug in your headphones and listen in to explore the ghoulish adventures of Anna McDonald as she gives a nightmarish peek into her world of JIRA bugs. It’s just what you might need this holiday season!EPISODE LINKSKAFKA-10888: Sticky partition leads to uneven product msg, resulting in abnormal delays in some partitionsKAFKA-9648: Add configuration to adjust listen backlog size for AcceptorKAFKA-9211: Kafka upgrade 2.3.0 may cause tcp delay ack(Congestion Control)KAFKA-12686: Race condition in AlterIsr response handlingKAFKA-12964: Corrupt segment recovery can delete new producer state snapshotsKAFKA-14334: DelayedFetch purgatory not completed when appending as followerSEASON 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 20, 2022 • 31min
Learn How Stream-Processing Works The Simplest Way Possible
Could you explain Apache Kafka® in ways that a small child could understand? When Mitch Seymour, author of Mastering Kafka Streams and ksqlDB, wanted a way to communicate the basics of Kafka and event-based stream processing, he decided to author a children’s book on the subject, but it turned into something with a far broader appeal.Mitch conceived the idea while writing a traditional manuscript for engineers and technicians interested in building stream processing applications. He wished he could explain what he was writing about to his 2-year-old daughter, and contemplated the best way to introduce the concepts in a way anyone could grasp.Four months later, he had completed the illustration book: Gently Down the Stream: A Gentle Introduction to Apache Kafka. It tells the story of a family of forest-dwelling Otters, who discover that they can use a giant river to communicate with each other. When more Otter families move into the forest, they must learn to adapt their system to handle the increase in activity.This accessible metaphor for how streaming applications work is accompanied by Mitch’s warm, painterly illustrations.For his second book, Seymour collaborated with the researcher and software developer Martin Kleppmann, author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications. Kleppmann admired the illustration book and proposed that the next book tackle a gentle introduction to cryptography. Specifically, it would introduce the concepts behind symmetric-key encryption, key exchange protocols, and the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, a method for exchanging secret information over a public channel.Secret Colors tells the story of a pair of Bunnies preparing to attend a school dance, who eagerly exchange notes on potential dates. They realize they need a way of keeping their messages secret, so they develop a technique that allows them to communicate without any chance of other Bunnies intercepting their messages.Mitch’s latest illustration book is—A Walk to the Cloud: A Gentle Introduction to Fully Managed Environments. In the episode, Seymour discusses his process of creating the books from concept to completion, the decision to create his own publishing company to distribute these books, and whether a fourth book is on the way. He also discusses the experience of illustrating the books side by side with his wife, shares his insights on how editing is similar to coding, and explains why a concise set of commands is equally desirable in SQL queries and children’s literature.EPISODE LINKSMinimizing Software Speciation with ksqlDB and Kafka StreamsGently Down the Stream: A Gentle Introduction to Apache KafkaSecret ColorsA Walk to the Cloud: A Gentle Introduction to Fully Managed EnvironmenSEASON 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 15, 2022 • 53min
Building and Designing Events and Event Streams with Apache Kafka
What are the key factors to consider when developing event-driven architecture? When properly designed, events can connect existing systems with a common language and allow data exchange in near real time. They also help reduce complexity by providing a single source of truth that eliminates the need to synchronize data between different services or applications. They enable dynamic behavior, allowing each service or application to respond quickly to changes in its environment. Using events, developers can create systems that are more reliable, responsive, and easier to maintain.In this podcast, Adam Bellemare, staff technologist at Confluent, discusses the four dimensions of events and designing event streams along with best practices, and an overview of a new course he just authored. This course, called Introduction to Designing Events and Event Streams, walks you through the process of properly designing events and event streams in any event-driven architecture.Adam explains that the goal of the course is to provide you with a foundation for designing events and event streams. Along with hands-on exercises and best practices, the course explores the four dimensions of events and event stream design and applies them to real-world problems. Most importantly, he talks to Kris about the key factors to consider when deciding what events to write, what events to publish, and how to structure and design them to trigger actions like broadcasting messages to other services or storing results in a database.How you design and implement events and event streams significantly affect not only what you can do today, but how you scale in the future. Head over to Introduction to Designing Events and Event Streams to learn everything you need to know about building an event-driven architecture.EPISODE LINKSIntroduction to Designing Events and Event StreamsPractical Data Mesh: Building Decentralized Data Architecture with Event StreamsThe Data Dichotomy: Rethinking the Way We Treat Data and ServicesCoding in Motion: Sound & Vision—Build a Data Streaming App with JavaScript and Confluent CloudUsing Event-Driven Design with Apache Kafka Streaming Applications ft. Bobby CalderwoodWatch the video version of this podcastKris Jenkins’ TwitterStreaming Audio Playlist 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 8, 2022 • 41min
Rethinking Apache Kafka Security and Account Management
Is there a better way to manage access to resources without compromising security? New employees need access to a variety of resources within a company's tech stack. But manually granting access can be error-prone. And when employees leave, their access must be revoked, thus potentially introducing security risks if an admin misses one. In this podcast, Kris Jenkins talks to Anuj Sawani (Security Product Manager, Confluent) about the centralized identity management system he helped build to integrate with Apache Kafka® to prevent common identity management headaches and security risks.With 12+ years of experience building cybersecurity products for enterprise companies, Anuj Sawani explains how he helped build out KIP-768 (Secured OAuth support in Kafka) that supports a unified identity mechanism that spans across cloud and on-premises (hybrid scenarios).Confluent Cloud customers wanted a single identity to access all their services. The manual process required managing different sets of identity stores across the ecosystem. Anuj goes on to explain how Identity and Access Management (IAM) using cloud-native authentication protocols, such as OAuth or OpenID Connect, solves this problem by centralizing identity and minimizing security risks.Anuj emphasizes that sticking with industry standards is key because it makes integrating with other systems easy. With OAuth now supported in Kafka, this means performing client upgrades, configuring identity providers, etc. to ensure the applications can leverage new capabilities. Some examples of how to do this are to use centralized identities for client/broker connections.As Anuj continues to build and enhance features, he hopes to recommend this unified solution to other technology vendors because it makes integration much easier. The goal is to create a web of connectors that support the same standards. The future is bright, as other organizations are researching supporting OAuth and similar industry standards. Anuj is looking forward to the evolution and applying it to other use cases and scenarios.EPISODE LINKSIntroduction to Confluent Cloud SecurityKIP-768: Secured OAuth support in Apache KafkaConfluent Cloud Documentation: OAuth 2.0 SupportApache Kafka Security Best PracticesSecurity for Real-Time Data Stream Processing with Confluent CloudWatch the video version of this podcastKris Jenkins’ TwitterStreaming Audio PlaylisSEASON 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.


