News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
Practical guidance on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
Lenses.io review: pricing and alternatives
Lenses.io review for 2026: honest assessment of SQL Studio, deployment complexity, pricing, and when to consider alternatives like Conduktor or Kpow.
Redpanda Console: pricing and alternatives
Redpanda Console reviewed for 2026: features, pricing, limitations, and the best alternatives for engineering teams running Apache Kafka or Redpanda.
Top Kafka UI tools in 2026: a practical comparison
Honest comparison of Kafka UI tools for enterprise teams. We evaluate AKHQ, Kafbat, Redpanda Console, Conduktor, Confluent Control Center, and Kpow.
Kpow Community Edition 🚀
Kpow Community Edition is a free, developer focused toolkit for Apache Kafka clusters, schema registries, and connect installations.
Best practices for Kafka data observability
12 best practices for Kafka data observability covering consumer lag monitoring, schema enforcement, end-to-end auditing, DLQs, and lineage, with an implementation roadmap.
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.
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.
Kafka cluster management: a practical guide
A practical guide to Kafka cluster management: architecture sizing, day-to-day operations, performance tuning, KRaft migration, and monitoring for production clusters.
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.