News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
Practical guidance on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
Best tools for Kafka schema registry management
Confluent Schema Registry, Apicurio, Karapace, AWS Glue, Redpanda, Kpow, Kafbat UI and AKHQ, scored on formats, compatibility checks, diffs, multiple registries and RBAC.
Best tools for Kafka SSO integration
Kafka SSO is two jobs: people signing in to Kafka UIs through Okta, Entra ID or Keycloak, and services authenticating to brokers with OAuth tokens. The tools for each half, scored on one rubric.
Best tools to manage Kafka topics at scale
Strimzi, Terraform, topicctl, JulieOps, Conduktor, AKHQ, Kafbat UI and Kpow, scored on topics as code, creation guardrails, scoped self-service, audit, multi-cluster reach and bulk operations.
Best Kafka terminal UIs (TUI)
Kafka terminal UIs scored on what you can see and change, multi-cluster, auth, keyboard UX and annual cost: ktea, Kaskade, kafui, Yozefu, kaftui, karat, the Kpow TUI and plain scripts.
How to diagnose and fix an unbalanced Kafka cluster
One broker hot, disk alerts on another, leader counts uneven. How to tell leader imbalance from data imbalance, the commands that fix each, how to throttle the move, and how to stop it coming back.
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.
Apache Iceberg: the complete guide
Apache Iceberg is an open table format bringing ACID transactions, schema evolution, and time travel to huge analytic tables in S3. This hub indexes what we've written about running it in production.
Iceberg use cases
Companies running Apache Iceberg in production, the architectures behind their deployments, and what to read next. Indexed as we publish new use-case research.