News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
Practical guidance on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
Kafka use cases
The production Kafka use cases with the numbers behind them: real-time analytics, event-driven microservices, change data capture, event sourcing and log aggregation, plus the business case for each.
Kafka KRaft
KRaft replaces ZooKeeper with a Raft quorum built into Kafka. The migration path and deadlines, controller sizing, the real scale limits, and day-2 operations for KRaft clusters.
ksqlDB on Kafka
ksqlDB is the streaming SQL layer for Kafka: streams and tables in SQL, persistent queries with state in internal topics. The push-vs-pull trap, and where it stands as Confluent shifts to Flink.
Kafka with Spring Boot
Spring Boot integrates with Kafka through spring-kafka: KafkaTemplate, @KafkaListener and auto-configuration. Production setup, dead letter topics, non-blocking retries, and listener tuning.
What is Apache Kafka?
Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform that stores records in ordered, partitioned, replayable logs. This is what it is, how the pieces fit, and when to choose it.
Best free Kafka UI tools in 2026
Compare the best free Kafka UI and management tools in 2026: Kpow Community Edition, Conduktor Console Community, Lenses Community Edition, AKHQ, and Kafbat UI.
Kafdrop: pricing and alternatives
Kafdrop review for 2026: strengths, limitations, pricing, and the best alternatives for platform and data engineers running production Kafka clusters.
Kafka dashboard: features that matter
A Kafka dashboard gives you real-time visibility into consumer lag, broker health, and partition state. Here's what to look for and how Kpow delivers it in production.
Kafka management console: what to look for
A Kafka management console gives your team full control of topics, consumers, schemas, and connectors from one UI. See what to look for and how Kpow delivers it.