Chad Harris, Solutions Architect at Factor House, worked through the governance questions a platform team gets asked once more than one team shares an Amazon MSK cluster: who can read a topic, what happens to the PII inside a payload, who approved an offset reset, and how you prove any of it after the fact. IAM policies and CloudTrail cover part of this, and the session focused on the rest.
Drawing on his experience running Kafka on high-volume, PCI-compliant systems, Chad covered mapping team structure onto role-based access control rather than per-principal IAM policies, practical multi-tenancy on a shared MSK cluster across namespacing, quotas, and view isolation, field-level data masking so engineers can debug production without reading customer data, and approval workflows in front of operations that are hard to undo, such as topic deletion, offset resets, and configuration changes.
The session closed on agentic Kafka operations, including what it means to let an AI agent inspect a cluster or carry out operational tasks, and why the controls above are what make that safe to attempt. Recorded live on 14 October 2026, it is aimed at platform teams running Amazon MSK who want to judge what their own setup is currently missing.
Speaker
Solutions Architect, Factor House
Chad Harris is a Solutions Architect at Factor House, bringing 18 years of experience across software engineering, application architecture, and engineering leadership. He has deep hands-on expertise with Apache Kafka, high-volume transactional systems, and PCI-compliant architectures, most recently as an Engineering Leader at Block (formerly Square). At Factor House, Chad works directly with global enterprise customers to help them improve how they manage, govern, and observe their real-time data.
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