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.

When you order a pizza, what if you knew every step of the process from the moment it goes in the oven to being delivered to your doorstep? Event-Driven Architecture is a modern, data-driven approach that describes “events” (i.e., something that just happened).

As one of the top coders of her Java coding class in high school, Twesha Modi is continuing to follow her passion for computer science as a senior at Cornell University, where she has proven to be one of the top programmers. During Twesha's summer internship at Confluent, she contributed to designing a new service to automate Apache Kafka cluster rollout management—a process that releases the latest Kafka versions to customer’s clusters in Confluent Cloud.

Infrastructure needs to react in real time to support globally distributed events, such as cloud migration, IoT, edge data collection, and disaster recovery. To provide a seamless yet cloud-native, cross-cluster topic replication experience, Nikhil Bhatia (Principal Engineer I, Product Infrastructure, Confluent) and the team engineered a solution called Cluster Linking. Available on Confluent Cloud, Cluster Linking is an API that enables Apache Kafka to work across multi-datacenters, making it possible to design globally available distributed systems.

Enabling private links on the cloud is increasingly important for security across networks and even the reliability of stream processing. Staff Software Engineer II Dan LaMotte and his team focus on making secure connections for customers to utilize Confluent Cloud. With the option of private links, you can now also build microservices that use new functionality that wasn’t available in the past. You no longer need to segment your workflow, thanks to completely secure connections between teams that are otherwise disconnected from one another.