Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

September 2023

An Introduction to Apache Kafka Consumer Group Strategy

Ever dealt with a misbehaving consumer group? Imbalanced broker load? This could be due to your consumer group and partitioning strategy! Once, on a dark and stormy night, I set myself up for this error. I was creating an application to demonstrate how you can use Apache Kafka® to decouple microservices. The function of my “microservices” was to create latte objects for a restaurant ordering service.

Data Streaming Cheat Sheet and Checklist | Data Streaming Systems

Thank you for watching this course. We have a few additional resources for you to dig deeper and be fully equiped to start your data in motion journey: a comprehensive cheat sheet with a check list of what you need to verify before going to production and a sneak preview of what we saved for the follow-up course.

Cloud Kafka Resiliency and Fault Tolerance | Data Streaming Systems

Learn how to manage cloud volatility when running applications on Confluent Cloud. Understand how to optimally configure Kafka client for resilient cloud operations and explore error handling patterns in Kafka Streams. Leverage concepts like idempotent producers and consumers, and exactly one processing semantics.

Current '23 Keynote: Streaming into the Future - The Evolution & Impact of Data Streaming Platforms

Jay Kreps (Confluent Co-Founder and CEO), Shaun Clowes (Confluent CPO), and data streaming leaders from organizations like NASA, Warner Brothers, and Notion explore the past, present, and future of data streaming. They will address two key questions: how can organizations integrate data across their applications to deliver better experiences, and how can they embed data and analytics into every part of the business to drive better decision-making?

Top 6 Reasons to Modernize Legacy Messaging Infrastructure

Traditional messaging middleware like Message Queues (MQs), Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs), and Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tools have been widely used for decades to handle message distribution and inter-service communication across distributed applications. However, they can no longer keep up with the needs of modern applications across hybrid and multi cloud environments for asynchronicity, heterogeneous datasets and high volume throughput.

Practical Data Mesh: Building Decentralized Data Architectures with Event Streams

Why a data mesh? Predicated on delivering data as a first-class product, data mesh focuses on making it easy to publish and access important data across your organization. An event-driven data mesh combines the scale and performance of data in motion with product-focused rigor and self-service capabilities, putting data at the front and center of both operational and analytical use-cases.

Confluent unveils Apache Flink® on Confluent Cloud, making it easier to build real-time applications with stream processing on a unified platform

Confluent launches the industry's only serverless, cloud-native Flink service to simplify building high-quality, reusable data streams. Confluent expands Stream Governance capabilities with Data Portal, so teams can easily find all the real-time data streams in an organisation. New Confluent Cloud Enterprise offering lowers the cost of private networking and storage for Apache Kafka.

Introducing Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink

In the first three parts of our Inside Flink blog series, we discussed the benefits of stream processing, explored why developers are choosing Apache Flink® for a variety of stream processing use cases, and took a deep dive into Flink's SQL API. In this post, we'll focus on how we’ve re-architected Flink as a cloud-native service on Confluent Cloud. However, before we get into the specifics, there is exciting news to share.

Deliver Intelligent, Secure, and Cost-Effective Data Pipelines

The Q3 Confluent Cloud Launch comes to you from Current 2023, where data streaming industry experts have come together to share insights into the future of data streaming and new areas of innovation. This year, we’re introducing Confluent Cloud’s fully managed service for Apache Flink®, improvements to Kora Engine, how AI and streaming work together, and much more.

Boost Data Streaming Performance, Uptime, and Scalability | Data Streaming Systems

Operate the data streaming platform efficiently by focusing on prevention, monitoring, and mitigation for maximum uptime. Handle potential data loss risks like software bugs, operator errors, and misconfigurations proactively. Leverage GitOps for real-time alerts and remediation. Adjust capacity to meet demand and monitor costs with Confluent Cloud's pay-as-you-go model. Prepare for growth with documentation and minimal governance.

Use GitOps as an efficient CI/CD pipeline for Data Streaming | Data Streaming Systems

Early automation saves time and money. GitOps improves CI/CD pipeline, enhancing operations & traceability. Learn to use GitOps for data streaming platforms & streaming applications with Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud.

Robust Disaster Recovery with Kafka and Confluent Cloud | Data Streaming Systems

Explore the resilience of Kafka, understand the implications of datacenter disruptions, and mitigate data loss impacts. Learn to scale with Confluent Cloud, cluster and schema linking, and how to use an active/passive disaster recovery pattern for business continuity.

How DISH Wireless Benefits From a Data Mesh Built With Confluent

"Over the last few years, DISH Wireless has turned to AWS partners like Confluent to build an entirely new type of telecommunication infrastructure—a cloud-native network built to empower developers. Discover how data streaming allows DISH Wireless to:— Deliver data products that turn network data into business value for customers— Harness massive volumes of data to facilitate the future of app communications— Seamlessly connect apps and devices across hybrid cloud environments.

Challenges Using Apache Kafka | Data Streaming Systems

Streaming platforms need key capabilities for smooth operations: data ingestion, development experience, management, security, performance, and maintenance. Self-managed platforms like Apache Kafka can meet these needs, but can be costly and require intensive maintenance. On the other hand, Confluent Cloud offers fully-managed services with features like scalable performance, auto-balancing, tiered storage, and enhanced security and resiliency. It provides systematic updates and maintenance, freeing users from infrastructure concerns. Confluent Cloud streamlines creation of a global, well-governed data streaming platform.

Top 5 Best Practices for Building Event-Driven Architectures Using Confluent and AWS Lambda

Confluent and AWS Lambda can be used for building real-time, scalable, fault-tolerant event-driven architectures, ensuring that your application logic is executed reliably in response to specific business events. Confluent provides a streaming SaaS solution based on Apache Kafka® and built on Kora: The Cloud Native Apache Kafka Engine, allowing you to focus on building event-driven applications without operating the underlying infrastructure.

Apache Kafka Message Compression

Apache Kafka® supports incredibly high throughput. It’s been known for feats like supporting 20 million orders per hour to get COVID tests out to US citizens during the pandemic. Kafka's approach to partitioning topics helps achieve this level of scalability. Topic partitions are the main "unit of parallelism" in Kafka. What’s a unit of parallelism? It’s like having multiple cashiers in the same store instead of one.

Dataflow Programming with Apache Flink and Apache Kafka

Recently, I got my hands dirty working with Apache Flink®. The experience was a little overwhelming. I have spent years working with streaming technologies but Flink was new to me and the resources online were rarely what I needed. Thankfully, I had access to some of the best Flink experts in the business to provide me with first-class advice, but not everyone has access to an expert when they need one.

Your Guide to Flink SQL: An In-Depth Exploration

In the first two parts of our Inside Flink blog series, we explored the benefits of stream processing with Flink and common Flink use cases for which teams are choosing to leverage the popular framework to unlock the full potential of streaming. Specifically, we broke down the key reasons why developers are choosing Apache Flink® as their stream processing framework, as well as the ways in which they are putting it into practice.

How to Run Apache Kafka on Windows

Is Windows your favorite development environment? Do you want to run Apache Kafka® on Windows? Thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2), now you can, and with fewer tears than in the past. Windows still isn’t the recommended platform for running Kafka with production workloads, but for trying out Kafka, it works just fine. Let’s take a look at how it’s done.

Design and Deployment Considerations for Deploying Apache Kafka on AWS

Various factors can impede an organization's ability to leverage Confluent Cloud, ranging from data locality considerations to stringent internal prerequisites. For instance, specific mandates might dictate that data be confined within a customer's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), or necessitate operation within an air-gapped VPC. However, a silver lining exists even in such circumstances, as viable alternatives remain available to address these specific scenarios.

Globe Group Slashes Infra Costs and Fuels Personalized Marketing With Confluent

But their batch-based processing systems and lack of access to self-service data was slowing them down, making it difficult to harness real-time data and create the targeted marketing campaigns they needed to reach their customers..

Real-time Fraud Detection - Use Case Implementation

When it comes to fraud detection in financial services, streaming data with Confluent enables you to build the right intelligence-as early as possible-for precise and predictive responses. Learn how Confluent's event-driven architecture and streaming pipelines deliver a continuous flow of data, aggregated from wherever it resides in your enterprise, to whichever application or team needs to see it. Enrich each interaction, each transaction, and each anomaly with real-time context so your fraud detection systems have the intelligence to get ahead.

Designing Event-Driven Systems

Many forces affect software today: larger datasets, geographical disparities, complex company structures, and the growing need to be fast and nimble in the face of change. Proven approaches such as service-oriented (SOA) and event-driven architectures (EDA) are joined by newer techniques such as microservices, reactive architectures, DevOps, and stream processing. Many of these patterns are successful by themselves, but as this practical ebook demonstrates, they provide a more holistic and compelling approach when applied together.