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News, guides, and engineering deep dives.

News, guides, and engineering deep dives on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.

Guides May 18, 2026·14 min read

Kafka message size best practice

How large should Kafka messages be in production? Covers sizing tiers, the four-config chain, compression codecs, and patterns for handling payloads above 1 MB.

Guides May 18, 2026·11 min read

Kafka partition key best practices

How Kafka partition keys work, what makes a good key, and practical guidance on cardinality, hot partitions, compaction, cross-language hashing, and safe key migration.

Guides May 11, 2026·18 min read

Kafka cluster management: A practical guide for engineers

A practical guide to Kafka cluster management: architecture sizing, day-to-day operations, performance tuning, KRaft migration, and monitoring for production clusters.

Guides May 11, 2026·17 min read

Kafka topic partition best practices

Size Kafka topic partitions correctly from day one. Covers the throughput formula, the keyed topic asymmetry, KRaft-era limits, and operational best practices.

Guides May 8, 2026·11 min read

The Complete Guide to Kafka Change Data Capture (CDC)

Learn how to implement change data capture with Kafka using Debezium. Includes working PostgreSQL CDC examples, architecture patterns, and monitoring.

Product May 6, 2026·4 min read

Enhanced Under-Replicated Partition Detection in Kpow

Kpow now offers enhanced under-replicated partition (URP) detection for more accurate Kafka health monitoring. Our improved calculation correctly identifies URPs even when brokers are offline, providing a true, real-time view of your cluster's fault tolerance. This helps you proactively mitigate risks and ensure data durability.

Guides May 6, 2026·10 min read

How to monitor Kafka consumer lag: 5 options

Learn what Kafka consumer lag is, why it occurs, and how to monitor it using built-in tools, custom solutions, and Kafka monitoring platforms.

How-to May 6, 2026·4 min read

Integrate Kpow with WarpStream

Integrate Kpow with WarpStream in minutes. Gain unified visibility and control over your BYOC Kafka data plane and Schema Registry through our market-leading engineering console.

Company May 6, 2026·5 min read

Introduction to Factor House Local

Jumpstart your journey into modern data engineering with Factor House Local. Explore pre-configured Docker environments for Kafka, Flink, Spark, and Iceberg, enhanced with enterprise-grade tools like Kpow and Flex. Our hands-on labs guide you step-by-step, from building your first Kafka client to creating a complete data lakehouse and real-time analytics system. It's the fastest way to learn, prototype, and build sophisticated data platforms.