News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
Practical guidance on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
Industry Apache Kafka 4.3.0: A guide for platform engineers
Kafka 4.3.0 covers broker cordoning, partition size metrics, share group tuning, and tiered storage fixes. Here's what platform engineers need to act on.
Product Data lineage support in Factor Platform
Learn how Factor Platform brings OpenLineage metadata into your Kafka environment, making data ownership, PII classification, and lineage visible by default.
Industry What the IBM-Confluent deal means for Kafka users
IBM's $11B Confluent acquisition raises questions for Kafka users. Assess your lock-in risk across Schema Registry, managed connectors, and operational tooling.
How to let an AI agent operate Kafka safely
Give an AI agent Kafka access without the keys: its own identity and ACLs, read-only first, human approval for destructive changes, audit of every call, and no sensitive payloads in the model.
How to inspect Kafka topics, messages and consumer groups from the terminal
Inspect Kafka over SSH with no web UI: brokers, under-replicated partitions, safe message peeks, Avro, consumer lag and Connect status, checked against Kafka 4.3 and kcat.
Best tools to manage Kafka ACLs
kafka-acls.sh, Terraform, kafka-gitops, Julie Ops, Strimzi, Klaw, Apache Ranger, OPA and the Kafka UIs, scored on auditability, pattern handling, automation, drift and visibility.
Kafka agent skills compared
Kafka agent skills for Claude Code and other coding agents, scored on one rubric: what the agent sees and changes, guardrails, SSO and RBAC reuse, context cost, and availability and cost a year.
How to troubleshoot Kafka with an AI agent
Troubleshoot Kafka with an AI agent: the read-only access to give it, the questions to ask, how to tell a connector fault from a database or catalog fault, and how to check its answer before you act.
Best tools for Kafka audit logging
Kafka audit logging happens at three layers: broker authorization logs, the audit trail of the tools people use, and data lineage. Every option for each layer, scored on the same rubric.
Best tools to manage Kafka broker configs
kafka-configs.sh, Strimzi, Terraform, JulieOps, AKHQ, Kafbat UI, Confluent Control Center and Kpow, scored on seeing the running config, catching drift, changing it safely and knowing who changed it.
Best tools to monitor Kafka broker health
Prometheus with the JMX Exporter, kafka_exporter, KMinion, Cruise Control, Datadog, New Relic, Confluent Control Center and Kpow, scored on the broker signals they actually see.
Kafka CLI commands for day-2 operations
The Kafka CLI commands operators run in production, checked against Kafka 4.3: topics, produce and consume, lag and offset resets, configs, cluster health and ACLs, with KRaft-era flag changes.