This week, get the scoop on what’s new in Apache Kafka 3.6 (spoilers: Tiered Storage and a grace period for stream-table joins!), learn why building queues on top of logs makes a lot of sense, discover how you can contribute to and engage with the Apache Flink community, get a tip for using the Kafka Storage tool, and plenty more. Enjoy!

Apache Kafka® Resources:

• Apache Kafka 3.6 is here! Check out the highlights of the release in the announcement blog post by the release manager, Satish Duggana. Or watch the release video featuring Danica Fine and a friendly bee colony.
• Queue semantics are coming to Apache Kafka in KIP-932. Learn the advantages to building queues on top of logs in a new blog post from Jack Vanlightly, and watch a demo by Andrew Schofield.
• If you’re a chronic houseplant killer, first know that you are not alone, and second know that you can get help… with Kafka! Hear Danica Fine speak at Devoxx Belgium 2023 about creating a houseplant monitoring and alerting system using a Raspberry Pi and Kafka.
• Are monoliths and microservices always opposing concepts? Not exactly. Wade Waldron’s quick video explores the similarities and differences between the design patterns and the gray area in between.

Apache Flink® Resources:

• Want to contribute to open source Flink? Or maybe ask the community some questions? Get tips in less than two minutes from David Anderson on the best ways to get involved in the Flink community!
• Learn how to start monitoring Flink using OpenTelemetry quickly and easily in this blog post by Jonathan Wamsley.
• If you still find yourself wondering what makes Apache Flink so popular, get a quick answer in this YouTube short featuring Danica Fine!

Terminal Tip of the Week:

This week, we'll learn about the Kafka storage tool. You can use it to generate a cluster UUID and then format the storage when you're running Kafka in KRaft mode.

First, you need to use the tool to generate a random UUID:

bin/kafka-storage.sh random-uuid
d5999679-ba23-4816-8363-0f67e28ae6e1

Using the tool ensures that it'll be a type 4 UUID not matching the internal Kafka UUIDs.

Next up, format your cluster with the id, passing in the path to your server.properties:

bin/kafka-storage.sh format -t d5999679-ba23-4816-8363-0f67e28ae6e1 -c config/kraft/server.properties

and that's it!

Links From Around the Web:

• Get spooked with programming horror stories or check out some fun Halloween-themed ASCII art.
• What does AI make of a giraffe with no spots?
• Learn how to debug browser redirects…. without ruining your day!

In Other News:

• In-person meetup in San Francisco (Oct 24): Unstructured Data in LLMs
• In-person meetup in New York City (Oct 26): The Latest in Real-Time Analytics
• Flink Forward, a conference dedicated to Flink and stream processing, is coming up on November 6th - 8th in Seattle!

By the way…

We hope you enjoyed our curated assortment of resources! If you’d like to provide feedback, suggest ideas for content you’d like to see, or you want to submit your own resource for consideration, send us an email at devx_newsletter@confluent.io!

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P.S. If you want to learn more about Kafka or Confluent Cloud, visit our developer site at Confluent Developer.