How do the principles of chaotic, agile operations in the military apply to software development and event-driven systems? As a former Royal Marine, Ben Ford (Founder and CEO, Commando Development) is also a software developer, with many years of experience building event streaming architectures across financial services and startups. He shares principles that the military employs in chaotic conditions as well as how these can be applied to event-streaming and agile development.

Imagine you can process and analyze real-time event streams for intelligence to mitigate cyber threats or keep soldiers constantly alerted to risks and precautions they should take based on events. In this episode, Jeffrey Needham (Senior Solutions Engineer, Advanced Technology Group, Confluent) shares use cases on how Apache Kafka can be used for real-time signal processing to mitigate risk before it arises. He also explains the classic Kafka transactional processing defaults and the distinction between transactional and analytic processing.

How is Apache Kafka relevant to blockchain technology and cryptocurrency? Fotios Filacouris (Staff Solutions Engineer, Confluent) has been working with Kafka for close to five years, primarily designing architectural solutions for financial services, he also has expertise in the blockchain. In this episode, he joins Kris to discuss how blockchain and Kafka are complementary, and he also highlights some of the use cases he has seen emerging that use Kafka in conjunction with traditional, distributed ledger technology (DLT) as well as blockchain technologies.

To ensure safe and efficient deployment of large-scale Confluent solutions including Apache Kafka clusters across multiple cloud providers, Rashmi Prabhu (Staff Software Engineer & Eng Manager, Fleet Management Platform, Confluent) and her team have been building a cluster management solution —the Fleet Management Platform for Confluent Cloud. In this episode, she delves into what Fleet Management is, and how the service streamlines Kafka operations in the cloud while providing a seamless developer experience.

What are some of the common mistakes that you have seen with Apache Kafka record production and consumption? Nikoleta Verbeck (Principal Solutions Architect at Professional Services, Confluent) has a role that specifically tasks her with performance tuning as well as troubleshooting Kafka installations of all kinds. Based on her field experience, she put together a comprehensive list of common issues with recommendations for building, maintaining, and improving Kafka systems that are applicable across use cases.