The past year saw an increase in technology upgrades and earlier adoption. As consistent leaders of global transformation, social media networks once again led the way—influencing the lives and work of people and businesses. While new social media tools and features introduced last year were already in development, these multi-billion dollar platforms continue to innovate. To stay ahead of the market you need to keep up with new social media trends.

It goes without saying that the usage of smartphones has been soaring all around the globe. In fact, a report by Statista suggests that the overall count of mobile phones all over the world is expected to be a whopping 3.8 billion by 2021 which is around half of the world’s population. Also, around 80% of the total time spent on mobile phones is dedicated to mobile apps.

The adoption of cloud-based solutions has become increasingly common. The proof for this is evident – according to Gartner, Inc., the worldwide public cloud services market is expected to grow by 6.3% in 2020, up to a staggering $257.9 billion in value. The Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, released on April 28, 2020, states that more than 90% of respondents have adopted cloud computing, with the top three cloud service providers being – AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

In the previous posts in this series, we have discussed Kerberos and LDAP authentication for Kafka. In this post, we will look into how to configure a Kafka cluster to use a PAM backend instead of an LDAP one. The examples shown here will highlight the authentication-related properties in bold font to differentiate them from other required security properties, as in the example below. TLS is assumed to be enabled for the Apache Kafka cluster, as it should be for every secure cluster.

Modern applications don’t function in isolation. To get the most out of the enterprise apps you build or buy, you’ll have to connect them to other applications. In other words, data engineers have to engage in effective application integration to achieve their business goals. Sometimes, this means connecting one application directly to another. But this is a rare occurrence in digitally transformed industries.

Building machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models obviously require plenty of data as a training-set and a test-set on which the model is tested against and evaluated. Best practices related to the setup of train-sets and test-sets have evolved in academic circles, however, within the context of applied data science, organizations need to take into consideration a very different set of requirements and goals. Ultimately, any model that a company builds aims to address a business problem.

If anyone's ever been to AWS ReInvent in Vegas before, you'll know it's a crazy ride. This year we missed out (at least we have cleaner consciences and healthier wallets). But the high quality of content hadn't changed. We've been binging on sessions ‘til the bitter end (it officially ended Friday). So for our community, here is a summary of a few talks related to Apache Kafka.

“We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months” said Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. Due to COVID-19, digital transformation roadmaps have been deleted, redrafted, doubled down and accelerated by up to a decade. Traditional companies are moving by osmosis towards streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka to kick off new digital services. But how much should it cost to experience 2030 in 2021?

We created the Terraform API gateway module to help you follow DevOps best practices while implementing Kong using infrastructure as code (IaC). Terraform is an open source tool that allows you to implement IaC using a declarative declaration definition. This Terraform module is the reference platform maintained by Kong for potential and existing customers to quickly set up both Kong Gateway and Kong Enterprise for demo and PoC environments.