A quick summary of the most important features in Confluent Platform 5.3. We discuss improved Kubernetes and Ansible support, improvements to Confluent Control Center that give you better insight into the data in your cluster, and an important new set of security features—Role-Based Access Control—aimed at making complex deployments more secure.

Rishi Dhanaraj worked at Zenreach as an intern and took on a big pile of Python batch jobs, turning them into some really interesting Kafka Streams code. Listen in as he walks us through how he did it.

Is Apache Kafka® actually a database? Can you install Confluent Control Center on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)? All this, plus some tips from Dan Norwood, the first user of Kafka Streams.

Author Dylan Scott tells all about his upcoming Manning title Kafka in Action, which shares how Apache Kafka® can be used by beginners who are just starting out their own projects. It also dispels common Hadoop-related myths, as Kafka has grown to become a powerful event streaming platform beyond big data ecosystems alone.

Gunnar Morling shares a little bit about what Debezium is, how it works, and which databases it supports. In addition to covering the various use cases and benefits from change data capture in the context of microservices, Gunnar walks us through the advantages of log-based CDC as implemented through Debezium over polling-based approaches, why you’d want to avoid dual writes to multiple resources, and working collaboratively with the community on Debezium.