Jason Gustafson dives into the challenges of working on distributed systems, particularly when it comes to a unique system like Apache Kafka. He also discusses ways in which Confluent is working with the community to solve active problems, and what it takes to be a distributed systems engineer.

Tim Berglund (Senior Director of Developer Experience, Confluent) explains the Kafka Improvement Proposals (KIPs) and what’s new in Apache Kafka 2.3.

If you operate a Kafka cluster, hopefully you upgrade your brokers occasionally. Well, what if you have to do it with hundreds or thousands of brokers, such as you’d have to do if you were running Confluent Cloud? Today, Gwen Shapira shares some of the lessons she’s learned doing just that.

Mitch Henderson explains how to plan and deploy your first application running on Confluent Platform. He covers critical factors to consider, how to make decisions about deployment solutions, how to go about setting up monitoring and testing, the marks of success, and what to do after your first project launches successfully.

Tim and Robin cover the motivating factors for Kafka Connect, why people end up reinventing the wheel when they're not aware of it and Kafka Connect's capabilities. They also talk about the importance of schemas in Apache Kafka® pipelines and programs, and how the Confluent Schema Registry can help.