It’s the first work-from-home episode of Ask Confluent, where Gwen Shapira (Core Kafka Engineering Leader, Confluent) virtually sits down with Apache Kafka® expert Anna McDonald (Staff Technical Account Manager, Confluent) to answer questions from Twitter.

Josh Long shares how the Spring and Kotlin teams have worked hard to make sure that Kotlin and Spring Boot are a first-class experience for all developers trying to get to production faster and safer. He also talks about the issues that arise when wrapping one set of APIs with another, as often arises in the Spring Framework: when APIs should leak, when they should not, and how not to try to be a better Kafka Streams when the original is working well enough.

Neil Buesing, an Apache Kafka community stalwart at Object Partners, discusses the concept of a CoE (center of excellence), and how a CoE is integral to attain and sustain world-class performance, business value, and success in a business.

Ever wonder what it's like to intern at a place like Confluent? Well, that's exactly what we discuss on today's episode with Leah Thomas.

The release of Confluent Platform 6.0, based on Apache Kafka 2.6, introduces Tiered Storage, Self-Balancing Clusters, ksqlDB 0.10, Admin REST APIs, and Cluster Linking in preview.