Welcome 2026!

For a data streaming engineer, this is the best of times ! With the advent of AI agents and agentic workflows reinventing data engineering tasks, the worth of quality data has skyrocketed! Data streaming is the only meaningful way to impose stream governance and stream quality checks on data, closer to the source. With Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink® leading the way with clean frameworks to implement "Shift-Left" patterns on streaming data, AI systems downstream are assured of getting data that is trustworthy, fresh, and relevant.

Let's start 2026 with technology news and updates around data streaming and AI and dive deep throughout this year, for exciting updates from the community newsletter team!

Evolving Confluent Hub to Confluent Marketplace

Confluent announced the official launch of Confluent Marketplace (formerly Confluent Hub), a centralized resource designed to accelerate innovation, drive connectivity, and dramatically simplify the developer experience within the data streaming landscape.

‌For years, integration engineers have been the quiet force behind the modern digital world. They connect systems that never communicated before, design architectures that keep businesses in motion, and make real-time intelligence possible—all while navigating an environment that evolves faster every quarter.

‌Until now, the work of these builders—the connectors, the sample code, the documentation—lived in silos: GitHub repos, internal projects, or proofs of concept shared at meetups. That's what Confluent Marketplace is here to change.

‌Confluent Hub is now Confluent Marketplace, a centralized destination for Confluent partners and community developers to share and soon monetize their contributions to the Confluent Cloud ecosystem. Learn how this launch will help organizations find the curated, validated solutions they need to succeed with the data streaming platform.

Read the official blog for more insights around Confluent Marketplace!

Data Streaming Resources

• Kafka Plugin for IntelliJ from JetBrains is officially released on the IntelliJ Marketplace under Confluent.

• What you can do today:

  • Connect to Kafka anywhere: Confluent Cloud, Confluent Platform, MSK, or self-hosted
  • Explore topics, produce, and consume messages
  • Work with consumer groups and Schema Registry

• What’s coming next:

  • OAuth sign-in for simple, frictionless Confluent Cloud connectivity
  • A richer message viewer, matching the advanced capabilities our VS Code users love
  • Project scaffolding to help developers quickly jumpstart streaming applications

• Check out the Kafka Plugin on the IntelliJ Marketplace today: Kafka - IntelliJ IDEs Plugin | Marketplace

• Over the past year, the batch and streaming engineering teams at Uber re-architected ingestion for some of Uber's most enormous datasets, moving from Spark-based batch pipelines to an Apache Flink®–powered streaming platform called IngestionNext. Their goal was to turn "hours to days" of lag into minutes-level freshness at a petabyte scale, while also driving meaningful compute savings. Read the insightful blog from the Uber engineering team, which talks about:

  • Why data freshness was a top priority for analytics, experimentation, and ML at Uber
  • How IngestionNext streams data from Kafka → Flink → Apache Hudi with strong guarantees on completeness and recovery
  • Techniques to address common streaming-at-scale issues like small Parquet files, partition skew, and checkpoint/commit synchronization
  • What this enables next: a fully end-to-end real-time data stack, from ingestion to transformation to analytics

Links From Around the Web:

• Late last year, in November 2024, McKinsey published the fascinating results of their survey on AI agents, titled The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation. Read the results of the survey which give IT teams a sneak peek into the adoption rate of AI agents. Quoting the article from McKinsey: "Looking at individual business functions, agent use is most commonly reported in IT and knowledge management, where agentic use cases such as service-desk management in IT and deep research in knowledge management have quickly developed. By industry, the use of AI agents is most widely reported in the technology, media and telecommunications, and healthcare sectors."
• Joe Reis, who needs no introduction in the data engineering world, has collected survey responses from the data engineering community and has created a very insightful report on "2026 Practical Data Community State of Data Engineering." The entire survey response is an interactive website that Joe has built that provides thought-provoking insights across the data engineering world and also captures how AI is affecting the data engineering community. Read it here and a big thank you to Joe!

In-Person Meetups

• Feb 19 - Athens @ NTT
• Feb 21 - Hyderabad
• Feb 21 - Mumbai
• Feb 24 -Tokyo
• Feb 25 - Berlin Workshop
• Feb 25 - Dublin @ Autodesk
• Feb 26 - Manila
• Feb 26 - NYC
• Feb 26 - London @ Fresha
• Feb 28 - Bangalore
• Mar 3 - Atlanta @ Improving
• Mar 5 - Vancouver @ Salesforce
• Mar 16 - Seattle
• Mar 17 - London @ Snowflake

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, email us at devx_newsletter@confluent.io.

If you’d like to view previous editions of the newsletter, visit our archive.

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