Confluent Developer ft. Tim Berglund, Adi Polak & Viktor Gamov

Maximizing cloud Apache Kafka® performance isn’t just about running data processes on cloud instances. There is a lot of engineering work required to set and maintain a high-performance standard for speed and availability. Alok Nikhil (Senior Software Engineer, Confluent) and Adithya Chandra (Staff Software Engineer II, Confluent) share about their efforts on how to optimize Kafka on Confluent Cloud and the three guiding principles that they follow whether you are self-managing Kafka  or working on a cloud-native system: Know your users and plan for their workloadsInfrastructure matters for performance as well as cost efficiency Effective observability—you can’t improve what you don’t see A large part of setting and achieving performance standards is about understanding that workloads vary and come with unique requirements. There are different dimensions for performance, such as the number of partitions and the number of connections. Alok and Adithya suggest starting by identifying the workload patterns that are the most important to your business objectives for simulation, reproduction, and using the results to optimize the software.   When identifying workloads, it’s essential to determine the infrastructure that you’ll need to support the given workload economically. Infrastructure optimization is as important as performance optimization. It's best practice to know the infrastructure that you have available to you and choose the appropriate hardware, operating system, and JVM to allocate the processes so that workloads run efficiently. With the necessary infrastructure patterns in place, it’s crucial to monitor metrics to ensure that your application is running as expected consistently with every release. Having the right observability metrics and logs allows you to identify and troubleshoot issues relatively quickly. Profiling and request sampling also help you dive deeper into performance issues, particularly, during incidents. Alok and Adithya’s team uses tooling such as the async-profiler for profiling CPU cycles, heap allocations, and lock contention.Alok and Adithya summarize their learnings and processes used for optimizing managed Kafka as a service, which can be applicable to your own cloud-native applications. You can also read more about their journey on the Confluent blog. EPISODE LINKSSpeed, Scale, Storage: Our Journey from Apache Kafka to Performance in Confluent CloudCloud-Native Apache KafkaJoin 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.

Implementing an event-driven data pipeline can be challenging, but doing so within the context of a legacy architecture is even more complex. Having spent three years building a streaming data infrastructure and being on the first team at a financial organization to implement Apache Kafka® event-driven data pipelines, Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent) shares about the development process and how ksqlDB and Kafka Connect became instrumental to the implementation.By moving away from batch processing to streaming data pipelines with Kafka, data can be distributed with increased data scalability and resiliency. Kafka decouples the source from the target systems, so you can react to data as it changes while ensuring accurate data in the target system. In order to transition from monolithic micro-batching applications to real-time microservices that can integrate with a legacy system that has been around for decades, Danica and her team started developing Kafka connectors to connect to various sources and target systems. Kafka connectors: Building two major connectors for the data pipeline, including a source connector to connect the legacy data source to stream data into Kafka, and another target connector to pipe data from Kafka back into the legacy architecture. Algorithm: Implementing Kafka Streams applications to migrate data from a monolithic architecture to a stream processing architecture. Data join: Leveraging Kafka Connect and the JDBC source connector to bring in all data streams to complete the pipeline.Streams join: Using ksqlDB to join streams—the legacy data system continues to produce streams while the Kafka data pipeline is another stream of data. As a final tip, Danica suggests breaking algorithms into process steps. She also describes how her experience relates to the data pipelines course on Confluent Developer and encourages anyone who is interested in learning more to check it out. EPISODE LINKSData Pipelines courseIntroduction to Streaming Data Pipelines with Apache Kafka and ksqlDBGuided Exercise on Building Streaming Data PipelinesMigrating from a Legacy System to Kafka StreamsWatch the video version of this podcastJoin the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Intro to Event-Driven Microservices withSEASON 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.

Getting data from a database management system (DBMS) into Apache Kafka® in real time is a subject of ongoing innovation. John Neal (Principal Solution Architect, Qlik) and Adam Mayer (Senior Technical Producer Marketing Manager, Qlik) explain how leveraging change data capture (CDC) for data ingestion into Kafka enables real-time data-driven insights. It can be challenging to ingest data in real time. It is even more challenging when you have multiple data sources, including both traditional databases and mainframes, such as SAP and Oracle. Extracting data in batch for transfer and replication purposes is slow, and often incurs significant performance penalties. However, analytical queries are often even more resource intensive and are prohibitively expensive to run on production transactional databases. CDC enables the capture of source operations as a sequence of incrementing events, converting the data into events to be written to Kafka. Once this data is available in the Kafka topics, it can be used for both analytical and operational use cases. Data can be consumed and modeled for analytics by individual groups across your organization. Meanwhile, the same Kafka topics can be used to help power microservice applications and help ensure data governance without impacting your production data source. Kafka makes it easy to integrate your CDC data into your data warehouses, data lake, NoSQL database, microservices, and any other system. Adam and John highlight a few use cases where they see real-time Kafka data ingestion, processing, and analytics moving the needle—including real-time customer predictions, supply chain optimizations, and operational reporting. Finally, Adam and John cap it off with a discussion on how capturing and tracking data changes are critical for your machine learning model to enrich data quality. EPISODE LINKSFast Track Business Insights with Data in MotionWatch the video version of this podcastJoin the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Intro to Event-Driven Microservices with ConfluentUse PODCAST100 to get an additional $100 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.

It’s been said that financial services organizations have been early Apache Kafka® adopters due to the strong delivery guarantees and scalability that Kafka provides. With experience working and designing architectural solutions for financial services, Fotios Filacouris (Senior Solutions Engineer, Enterprise Solutions Engineering, Confluent) joins Tim to discuss how Kafka and Confluent help banks build modern architectures, highlighting key emerging use cases from the sector. Previously, Kafka was often viewed as a simple pipe that connected databases together, which allows for easy and scalable data migration. As the Kafka ecosystem evolves with added components like ksqlDB, Kafka Streams, and Kafka Connect, the implementation of Kafka goes beyond being just a pipe—it’s an intelligent pipe that enables real-time, actionable data insights.Fotios shares a couple of use cases showcasing how Kafka solves the problems that many banks are facing today. One of his customers transformed retail banking by using Kafka as the architectural base for storing all data permanently and indefinitely. This approach enables data in motion and a better user experience for frontend users while scrolling through their transaction history by eliminating the need to download old statements that have been offloaded in the cloud or a data lake. Kafka also provides the best of both worlds with increased scalability and strong message delivery guarantees that are comparable to queuing middleware like IBM MQ and TIBCO. In addition to use cases, Tim and Fotios talk about deploying Kafka for banks within the cloud and drill into the profession of being a solutions engineer. EPISODE LINKSWatch the video version of this podcastJoin the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Intro to Event-Driven Microservices with ConfluentUse PODCAST100 to get an additional $100 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.

What’s it like building a stream processing platform with around 300 stateful stream processing applications based on Kafka Streams? Levani Kokhreidze (Principal Engineer, Wise) shares his experience building such a platform that the business depends on for multi-currency movements across the globe. He explains how his team uses Kafka Streams for real-time money transfers at Wise, a fintech organization that facilitates international currency transfers for 11 million customers. Getting to this point and expanding the stream processing platform is not, however, without its challenges. One of the major challenges at Wise is to aggregate, join, and process real-time event streams to transfer currency instantly. To accomplish this, the Wise relies on Apache Kafka® as an event broker, as well as Kafka Streams, the accompanying Java stream processing library. Kafka Streams lets you build event-driven microservices for processing streams, which can then be deployed alongside the Kafka cluster of your choice. Wise also uses the Interactive Queries feature in Kafka streams, to query internal application state at runtime. The Wise stream processing platform has gradually moved them away from a monolithic architecture to an event-driven microservices model with around 400 total microservices working together. This has given Wise the ability to independently shape and scale each service to better serve evolving business needs. Their stream processing platform includes a domain-specific language (DSL) that provides libraries and tooling, such as Docker images for building your own stream processing applications with governance. With this approach, Wise is able to store 50 TB of stateful data based on Kafka Streams running in Kubernetes. Levani shares his own experiences in this journey with you and provides you with guidance that may help you follow in Wise’s footsteps. He covers how to properly delegate ownership and responsibilities for sourcing events from existing data stores, and outlines some of the pitfalls they encountered along the way. To cap it all off, Levani also shares some important lessons in organization and technology, with some best practices to keep in mind. EPISODE LINKSKafka Streams 101 courseReal-Time Stream Processing with Kafka Streams ft. Bill BejeckWatch the video version of this podcastJoin the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Intro to Event-Driven Microservices with ConfluentUse PODCAST100 to get an additional $100 of free Confluent Cloud 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.

You might call building and operating Apache Kafka® as a cloud-native data service synonymous with a serverless experience. Prachetaa Raghavan (Staff Software Developer I, Confluent) spends his days focused on this very thing. In this podcast, he shares his learnings from implementing a serverless architecture on Confluent Cloud using Kubernetes Operator. Serverless is a cloud execution model that abstracts away server management, letting you run code on a pay-per-use basis without infrastructure concerns. Confluent Cloud's major design goal was to create a serverless Kafka solution, including handling its distributed state, its performance requirements, and seamlessly operating and scaling the Kafka brokers and Zookeeper. The serverless offering is built on top of an event-driven microservices architecture that allows you to deploy services independently with your own release cadence and maintained at the team level.There are 4 subjects that help create the serverless event streaming experience with Kafka:Confluent Cloud control plane: This Kafka-based control plane provisions resources required to run the application. It automatically scales resources for services, such as managed Kafka, managed ksqlDB, and managed connectors. The control plane and data plane are decoupled—if a single data plane has issues, it doesn’t affect the control plane or other data planes. Kubernetes Operator: The operator is an application-specific controller that extends the functionality of the Kubernetes API to create, configure, and manage instances of complex applications on behalf of Kubernetes users. The operator looks at Kafka metrics before upgrading a broker at a time. It also updates the status on cluster rebalancing and on shrink to rebalance data onto the remaining brokers. Self-Balancing Clusters: Cluster balance is measured on several dimensions, including replica counts, leader counts, disk usage, and network usage. In addition to storage rebalancing, Self-Balancing Clusters are essential to making sure that the amount of available disk and network capability is satisfied during any balancing decisions. Infinite Storage: Enabled by Tiered Storage, Infinite Storage rebalances data fast and efficiently—the most recently written data is stored directly on Kafka brokers, while older segments are moved off into a separate storage tier.  This has the added bonus of reducing the shuffling of data due to regular broker operations, like partition rebalancing. EPISODE LINKSMaking Apache Kafka Serverless: Lessons From Confluent CloudCloud-Native Apache KafkaJoin the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: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.

What does cloud native mean, and what are some design considerations when implementing cloud-native data services? Gwen Shapira (Apache Kafka® Committer and Principal Engineer II, Confluent) addresses these questions in today’s episode. She shares her learnings by discussing a series of technical papers published by her team, which explains what they’ve done to expand Kafka’s cloud-native capabilities on Confluent Cloud. Gwen leads the Cloud-Native Kafka team, which focuses on developing new features to evolve Kafka to its next stage as a fully managed cloud data platform. Turning Kafka into a self-service platform is not entirely straightforward, however, Kafka’s early day investment in elasticity, scalability, and multi-tenancy to run at a company-wide scale served as the North Star in taking Kafka to its next stage—a fully managed cloud service where users will just need to send us their workloads and everything else will magically work. Through examining modern cloud-native data services, such as Aurora, Amazon S3, Snowflake, Amazon DynamoDB, and BigQuery, there are seven capabilities that you can expect to see in modern cloud data systems, including: Elasticity: Adapt to workload changes to scale up and down with a click or APIs—cloud-native Kafka omits the requirement to install REST Proxy for using Kafka APIsInfinite scale: Kafka has the ability to elastic scale with a behind-the-scene process for capacity planning Resiliency: Ensures high availability to minimize downtown and disaster recovery Multi-tenancy: Cloud-native infrastructure needs to have isolations—data, namespaces, and performance, which Kafka is designed to supportPay per use: Pay for resources based on usageCost-effectiveness: Cloud deployment has notably lower costs than self-managed services, which also decreases adoption time Global: Connect to Kafka from around the globe and consume data locallyBuilding around these key requirements, a fully managed Kafka as a service provides an enhanced user experience that is scalable and flexible with reduced infrastructure management costs. Based on their experience building cloud-native Kafka, Gwen and her team published a four-part thesis that shares insights on user expectations for modern cloud data services as well as technical implementation considerations to help you develop your own cloud-native data system. EPISODE LINKSCloud-Native Apache KafkaDesign Considerations for Cloud-Native Data SystemsSoftware Engineer, Cloud Native KafkaJoin 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.

What is ksqlDB and how does Simon Aubury (Principal Data Engineer, Thoughtworks) use it to track down the plane that wakes his cat Snowy in the morning? Experienced in building real-time applications with ksqlDB since its genesis, Simon provides an introduction to ksqlDB by sharing some of his projects and use cases. ksqlDB is a database purpose-built for stream processing applications and lets you build real-time data streaming applications with SQL syntax. ksqlDB reduces the complexity of having to code with Java, making it easier to achieve outcomes through declarative programming, as opposed to procedural programming. Before ksqlDB, you could use the producer and consumer APIs to get data in and out of Apache Kafka®; however, when it comes to data enrichment, such as joining, filtering, mapping, and aggregating data, you would have to use the Kafka Streams API—a robust and scalable programming interface influenced by the JVM ecosystem that requires Java programming knowledge. This presented scaling challenges for Simon, who was at a multinational insurance company that needed to stream loads of data from disparate systems with a small team to scale and enrich data for meaningful insights. Simon recalls discovering ksqlDB during a practice fire drill, and he considers it as a memorable moment for turning a challenge into an opportunity.Leveraging your familiarity with relational databases, ksqlDB abstracts away complex programming that is required for real-time operations both for stream processing and data integration, making it easy to read, write, and process streaming data in real time.Simon is passionate about ksqlDB and Kafka Streams as well as getting other people inspired by the technology. He’s been using ksqlDB for projects, such as taking a stream of information and enriching it with static data. One of Simon’s first ksqlDB projects was using Raspberry Pi and a software-defined radio to process aircraft movements in real time to determine which plane wakes his cat Snowy up every morning. Simon highlights additional ksqlDB use cases, including e-commerce checkout interaction to identify where people are dropping out of a sales funnel. EPISODE LINKSksqlDB 101 courseA Guide to ksqlDB Fundamentals and Stream Processing ConceptsksqlDB 101 Training with Live Walkthrough ExerciseKSQL-ops! Running ksqlDB in the WildArticles from Simon AuburyWatch the video version of this podcastJoin the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resouSEASON 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.

Many of us find ourselves in the position of equipping others to use Apache Kafka® after we’ve gained an understanding of what Kafka is used for. But how do you communicate and teach others event streaming concepts effectively? As a Pluralsight instructor and business intelligence consultant, Eugene Meidinger shares tips for creating consumable training materials for conveying event streaming concepts to developers and IT administrators, who are trying to get on board with Kafka and stream processing. Eugene’s background as a database administrator (DBA) and immense knowledge of event streaming architecture and data processing shows as he reveals his learnings from years of working with Microsoft Power BI, Azure Event Hubs, data processing, and event streaming with ksqlDB and Kafka Streams. Eugene mentions the importance of understanding your audience, their pain points, and their questions, such as why was Kafka invented? Why does ksqlDB matter? It also helps to use metaphors where appropriate. For example, when explaining what is processing typology for Kafka Streams, Eugene uses the analogy of a highway where people are getting on a bus as the blocking operations, after the grace period, the bus will leave even without passengers, meaning after the window session, the processor will continue even without events. He also likes to inject a sense of humor in his training and keeps empathy in mind. Here is the structure that Eugene uses when building courses:The first module is usually fundamentals, which lays out the groundwork and the objectives of the courseIt's critical to repeat and summarize core concepts or major points; for example, a key capability of Kafka is the ability to decouple data in both network space and in time Provide variety and different modalities that allow people to consume content through multiple avenues, such as screencasts, slides, and demos, wherever it makes senseEPISODE LINKSBuilding ETL Pipelines from Streaming Data with Kafka and ksqlDBDon't Make Me Think | Steve KrugDesign for How People Learn | Julie Dirksen Watch the video version of this podcastJoin the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Intro to Event-Driven Microservices with ConfluentUse PODCAST100 to get $100 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.

If you ever wondered what exactly dead letter queues (DLQs) are and how to use them, Jason Bell (Senior DataOps Engineer, Digitalis) has an answer for you. Dead letter queues are a feature of Kafka Connect that acts as the destination for failed messages due to errors like improper message deserialization and improper message formatting. Lots of Jason’s work is around Kafka Connect and the Kafka Streams API, and in this episode, he explains the fundamentals of dead letter queues, how to use them, and the parameters around them. For example, when deserializing an Avro message, the deserialization could fail if the message passed through is not Avro or in a value that doesn’t match the expected wire format, at which point, the message will be rerouted into the dead letter queue for reprocessing. The Apache Kafka® topic will reprocess the message with the appropriate converter and send it back onto the sink. For a JSON error message, you’ll need another JSON connector to process the message out of the dead letter queue before it can be sent back to the sink. Dead letter queue is configurable for handling a deserialization exception or a producer exception. When deciding if this topic is necessary, consider if the messages are important and if there’s a plan to read into and investigate why the error occurs. In some scenarios, it’s important to handle the messages manually or have a manual process in place to handle error messages if reprocessing continues to fail. For example, payment messages should be dealt with in parallel for a better customer experience. Jason also shares some key takeaways on the dead letter queue: If the message is important, such as a payment, you need to deal with the message if it goes into the dead letter queue To minimize message routing into the dead letter queue, it’s important to ensure successful data serialization at the sourceWhen implementing a dead letter queue, you need a process to consume the message and investigate the errors EPISODE LINKS: Kafka Connect 101: Error Handling and Dead Letter QueuesCapacity Planning your Kafka ClusterTales from the Frontline of Apache Kafka DevOps ft. Jason BellTweet: Morning morning (yes, I have tea)Tweet: Kafka dead letter queues Watch the video version of this podcastJoin the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, 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.