Streaming Audio: A Confluent Podcast about Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka isn’t just for day jobs according to Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent). It can be used to make life easier at home, too! Building out a practical Apache Kafka® data pipeline is not always complicated—it can be simple and fun. For Danica, the idea of building a Kafka-based data pipeline sprouted with the need to monitor the water level of her plants at home. In this episode, she explains the architecture of her hardware-oriented project and discusses how she integrates, processes, and enriches data using ksqlDB and Kafka Connect, a Raspberry Pi running Confluent's Python client, and a Telegram bot. Apart from the script on the Raspberry Pi, the entire project was coded within Confluent Cloud.

Apache Kafka 3.2 delivers new KIPs in three different areas of the Kafka ecosystem: Kafka Core, Kafka Streams, and Kafka Connect. On behalf of the Kafka community, Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent), shares release highlights

How much can Apache Kafka scale horizontally, and how can you automatically balance, or rebalance data to ensure optimal performance? You may require the flexibility to scale or shrink your Kafka clusters based on demand. With experience engineering cluster elasticity and capacity management features for cloud-native Kafka, Ajit Yagaty (Confluent Cloud Control Plane Engineering) and Aashish Kohli (Confluent Cloud Product Management) join Kris Jenkins in this episode to explain how the architecture of Confluent Cloud supports elasticity.

What are useful practices for migrating a system to Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud? Picnic, an online-only, European grocery store that processes around 45 million customer events and five million internal events daily. An underlying goal at Picnic is to try and make decisions as data-driven as possible. In this episode, Dima Kalashnikov (Technical Lead, Picnic Technologies) shares several reasons for their recent migration to Confluent Cloud for better data analytics.

Coding is inherently enjoyable and experimental. With the goal of bringing fun into programming, Kris Jenkins (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent) hosts a new series of hands-on workshops—Coding in Motion, to teach you how to use Apache Kafka and data streaming technologies for real-life use cases.