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.

Kafka Connect is a streaming integration framework between Apache Kafka and external systems, such as databases and cloud services. With expertise in ksqlDB and Kafka Connect, Robin Moffatt (Staff Developer Advocate, Confluent) helps and supports the developer community in understanding Kafka and its ecosystem. Recently, Robin authored a Kafka Connect 101 course that will help you understand the basic concepts of Kafka Connect, its key features, and how it works.

When building solutions for customers in Microsoft Azure, it is not uncommon to come across customers who are deeply entrenched in the Kafka ecosystem and want to continue expanding within it. Thus, figuring out how to connect Azure first-party services to this ecosystem is of the utmost importance. Ryan CrawCour (Engineer, Microsoft) explains how you can use a connector to feed events from your Kafka infrastructure into Azure Cosmos DB, as well as how to get changes from your database system back into their Kafka topics.

Isaac Kunen discusses the Snowflake Kafka Connector and some of the unique challenges and adaptations it has had to undergo, as well as the interesting history behind the connector. In addition, he shares how Snowflake is taking on event streaming by implementing the Kafka connector and what he hopes to see in the future with Kafka releases.

Liz Bennett explains how she implemented Apache Kafka® at Stitch Fix, her previous employer, where she successfully introduced Kafka first through a Kafka hackathon and then by pitching it to the management team.