Streaming Audio: A Confluent Podcast about Apache Kafka

Many of us find ourselves in the position of equipping others to use Apache Kafka after we’ve gained an understanding of what Kafka is used for. But how do you communicate and teach others event streaming concepts effectively? As a Pluralsight instructor and business intelligence consultant, Eugene Meidinger shares tips for creating consumable training materials for conveying event streaming concepts to developers and IT administrators, who are trying to get on board with Kafka and stream processing.

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.

Confluent Platform 7.0 has launched and includes Apache Kafka 3.0, plus new features introduced by KIP-630: Kafka Raft Snapshot, KIP-745: Connect API to restart connector and task, and KIP-695: Further improve Kafka Streams timestamp synchronization. Reporting from Dubai, Tim Berglund (Senior Director, Developer Advocacy, Confluent) provides a summary of new features, updates, and improvements to the 7.0 release, including the ability to create a real-time bridge from on-premises environments to the cloud with Cluster Linking.

Kafka Streams is a native streaming library for Apache Kafka that consumes messages from Kafka to perform operations like filtering a topic’s message and producing output back into Kafka. After working as a developer in stream processing, Bill Bejeck (Apache Kafka Committer and Integration Architect, Confluent) has found his calling in sharing knowledge and authoring his book, “Kafka Streams in Action.” As a Kafka Streams expert, Bill is also the author of the Kafka Streams 101 course on Confluent Developer, where he delves into what Kafka Streams is, how to use it, and how it works.

Managing infrastructure as code (IaC) instead of using manual processes makes it easy to scale systems and minimize errors. Rosemary Wang (Developer Advocate, HashiCorp, and author of “Essential Infrastructure as Code: Patterns and Practices”) is an infrastructure engineer at heart and an aspiring software developer who is passionate about teaching patterns for infrastructure as code to simplify processes for system admins and software engineers familiar with Python, provisioning tools like Terraform, and cloud service providers.