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Constantly starting and stopping Apache Kafka producers and consumers? That’s a recipe for high resource usage and inefficiency. Short-lived connections are heavy on resources, and can slow down your whole cluster. Keep them running to boost performance, cut latency, and get the most out of your Kafka setup.

Default settings in Apache Kafka work when you’re getting started, but aren't suited for production. Sticking with defaults, like a seven-day retention policy, or a replication factor of one, can cause storage issues, or data loss in case of failure. Learn why optimizing retention periods, replication factors, and partitions, is crucial for better Kafka performance and reliability.

Keeping your Apache Kafka clients up-to-date is critical for maximizing performance, security, and stability. In this video, we discuss why sticking with old versions could be putting you at risk, since it means you’re missing out on dozens of new features, and hundreds of bug fixes and security patches. Learn why upgrading is more than just a “nice-to-have”—it’s essential for a smoother and safer Kafka experience.

Lenses 6.0 is now available as a Community Edition for you to use for free forever. You can connect it to up to 2 Kafka clusters, or if you prefer, it has a localhost for local development. Simply run the docker command here: And follow the steps in the video to get started.

Lenses can now help you to work with data streams on one screen, regardless of how you select your streaming data architecture. This is how we see autonomy in data streaming.

With the new branding, we’ve also redefined how developers work with real-time data and data architectures. Lenses 6 is a new version of Developer Experience designed to empower developers to operate data seamlessly across multiple clusters and environments. With Global SQL Studio. This is what we mean by Autonomy in Data Streaming.

Setting up network connections can often seem difficult or time consuming. This video provides a wayfinding introduction to help you get networking up and running for all cluster types on Confluent Cloud, showing you your networking options for each cluster type when running on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, respectively.

In this short video, a Confluent Solutions Engineering will run through the high-level steps on how to get started with your migration. And even better, once you’re done watching, you can download our comprehensive migration kit for a step by step guide of everything I’ve talked about and more.