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.
Topic lineage and actions in the terminal UI
fh 1.1 adds topic lineage to the terminal UI, and lets you manage topics, consumer groups, Kafka Connect connectors and Flink jobs without leaving it.
OpenID Connect, CLI, TUI, and Agent Skills
Kpow release 96.5 improves OpenID Connect for both the Web UI and API and unlocks new CLI, TUI, and agent skills in Kpow for Apache Kafka.
Factor CLI, Terminal UI and Agent Skills
fh 1.0, the Factor House command-line interface and terminal UI for Kpow: every REST endpoint as a command, a live terminal UI over the Kpow data feed, and agent skills for coding agents.
Retry visibility for Lambda functions triggered by MSK
Lambda's default retry behavior for MSK-triggered functions gives you no attempt count and no way to tell a first try from a tenth. A lab comparing implicit and explicit retry paths closes the gap.
MirrorMaker 2 on Connect: migrating off connect-mirror-maker.sh
Moving MirrorMaker 2 off connect-mirror-maker.sh onto Kafka Connect: replication progress doesn't migrate, offset translation is off by default, and when not to bother.
Kafka DLQs per consumer group: a consumer-side, Kafka-only design
Why each Kafka consumer group should own its DLQ and retry topic, why replay never goes back to the main topic, and why retrying transient downstream failures is an anti-pattern.
Avro data inspect improvements
Kpow 96.4 improves Avro data inspection, including key ordering for arrays of records and a fix for producing null values on optional primitive types.
Kpow Signals (Alpha) preview
Kpow 96.3 introduces Signals (Alpha), providing constant monitoring for clusters and early insight into critical issues, potential problems, and future degradations.
Schema refs, Data Inspect updates
Kpow 96.2 adds an inline schema references view and extensive Data Inspect improvements.