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.

Ask Confluent is back! Gwen and Tim talk through how to submit a proposal and get accepted to conferences, the secret for a long marriage, REST Proxy, and how Kafka relates to Splunk. For those who have just started integrating Kafka, Tim and Gwen provide pointers about how to go about understanding it.

Vinoth Chandar and Gwen Shapira discuss what ksqlDB is, the kinds of applications that you can build with it, vulnerabilities, and various ksqlDB use cases. They also talk about what's currently the best version of Apache Kafka version for performance improvements that don’t cause breaking changes to existing Kafka configuration and functionality.

Gwen Shapira answers your questions on creating tables in nested JSON topics, how to balance ordering, latency and reliability, building event-based systems, and how to navigate the tricky endOffsets API. She also discusses the hardships of fencing zombie requests, talks given at previous Kafka Summits, and an important question from Ask Confluent #3.

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.