The year 2024 was special for us in several respects. It’s been a decade since the unveiling of Tideways’ predecessor, and we’ve come a long way since then. We would like to express gratitude to our customers, partners, colleagues, friends, and family for their ongoing support and dedication. Without you, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We are particularly pleased to be able to welcome many new partners this year.

At Confluent, we’re committed to building the world's leading data streaming platform that gives you the ability to stream, connect, process, and govern all your data, and makes it available wherever it’s needed, however it’s needed, in real time. Today, we're excited to announce the release of Confluent Platform 7.8. This release builds upon Apache Kafka 3.8, reinforcing our core capabilities as a data streaming platform.

It’s 2025, and manual finance workflows are a thing of the past—or at least they should be. Enterprises and organizations in the healthcare, financial services, logistics, and retail sectors deal with thousands of invoices daily. Considering the high volume, automation is the obvious solution to ensure efficient and streamlined operations.

In part one of this series, we managed distributed state using GenServers. This provided a foundation for understanding some core concepts in distributed Phoenix applications. Now, we turn our focus to deployment and scaling strategies. As your application evolves to meet growing demands, knowing how to scale horizontally, maintain high availability, and monitor distributed components becomes crucial.

Imagine a user waiting several seconds for an app to load due to slow API responses. Frustration builds, user retention plummets, and scaling becomes a nightmare. API performance is a critical determinant of user experience and system reliability. Fast APIs ensure seamless interactions and support scalability. Among the strategies to enhance API speed, caching stands out as a powerful, cost-efficient approach.

We are seeing businesses across industries engage with large-scale projects needing a talent pool experienced in AI, cloud, IoT, or other emerging technologies. However, the fluctuating nature of these projects requires a flexible workforce, which can only naturally comprise part-time hires. This is why we see a steady investment in the staff augmentation market. The 2023 evaluation for the IT staff augmentation market was approximately USD 300 billion in the recent market reports.

We had a busy week catching up with customers and partners at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago and online. We shared lots of exciting innovations to help customers build applications, keep their data architecture open and flexible and harness the power of AI in so many ways. Here’s a quick recap.