News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
News, guides, and engineering deep dives on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
A final goodbye to OperatrIO
2025 is a pivotal moment at Factor House (formally Operatr.IO). We've announced our fundraise and have much more to announce about our roadmap this year. This is why we think that now is the perfect time to do a bit of spring cleaning and retire the io.operatr artifacts for good.
Ensuring Your Data Streaming Stack Is Ready for the EU Data Act
The EU Data Act takes effect in September 2025, introducing major implications for teams running Kafka. This article explores what the Act means for data streaming engineers, and how Kpow can help ensure compliance — from user data access to audit logging and secure interoperability.
Deploy Kpow on EKS via AWS Marketplace using Helm
Streamline your Kpow deployment on Amazon EKS with our guide, fully integrated with the AWS Marketplace. We use eksctl to automate IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA), providing a secure integration for Kpow's licensing and metering. This allows your instance to handle license validation via AWS License Manager and report usage for hourly subscriptions, enabling a production-ready deployment with minimal configuration.
Beyond Kafka: Sharp Signals from Current London 2025
The real-time ecosystem has outgrown Kafka alone. At Current London 2025, the transition from Kafka Summit was more than a name change — it marked a shift toward streaming-first AI, system-level control, and production-ready Flink. Here's what Factor House saw and learned on the ground.
Amazon Corretto 11 Memory Issues
A recent move to v2 cgroups by a number of Linux distributions (including Amazon Linux 2022 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9) highlights an issue in Amazon Corretto 11 where the JVM process can cause a Docker container to exit with OOMKilled errors.
Introducing Factor House 2.0 🚀
Today we introduce Flex for Apache Flink, and announce the Factor Platform, the future of distributed systems engineering.
Factor House Product VPAT
We first published a VPAT in the release notes of Kpow for Apache Kafka v92.4, with a VPAT available to download in every release of Kpow since. Today, we are pleased to announce that we are extending that commitment to all future Factor House product releases - including Flex for Apache Flink and the Factor Platform.
From Bootstrap to Blackbird: The Future of Factor House
We are thrilled to announce that Factor House has closed a $5M seed round to accelerate the commercial release of our new product, the Factor Platform. Led by Blackbird Ventures, with OIF Ventures, Flying Fox Ventures, and LaunchVic’s Alice Anderson Fund as partners, this round brings our five-year bootstrapping journey to a happy conclusion and points to a bright future ahead!
Introducing Kpow's new API
With our new API, you can now leverage Kpow's capabilities directly from your own tools and platforms, opening up a whole new range of possibilities for integrating Kpow into your existing workflows. Whether you're managing topics, consumer groups, or monitoring Kafka clusters, our API provides a seamless experience that mirrors the functionality of our user interface.