News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
Practical guidance on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
Best Kafka UI tools for StreamNative Cloud
Kpow ranks first of six Kafka UI tools for StreamNative Cloud, scored on governance beyond StreamNative RBAC, the data path, sign-in and the Schema Registry.
Best Kafka UI tools for Strimzi (Kafka on Kubernetes)
Kpow ranks first of eight Kafka UI tools for Strimzi, including StreamsHub Console, on mTLS, SCRAM and OAuth sign-in, per-person audit and Kubernetes fit.
Best Kafka management tools for banks
Kafka management tools for banks, scored on time-boxed production access, a per-person audit trail, directory sign-in, shared clusters, on-prem plus cloud, and staying out of the data path.
Best Kafka UI tools for Amazon MSK
Kpow ranks first of seven Kafka UI tools for Amazon MSK, scored on IAM and SCRAM sign-in, MSK Serverless, MSK Connect, AWS Glue, per-person governance and VPC fit.
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 agents, scored on one rubric. Covers guardrails, SSO and RBAC reuse, audit, cost, and Kpow as the self-hosted option for regulated teams.
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.