Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Welcome to “Elephant in the Room – Presented by Aiven.” In this live series, we dig into the real-world challenges developers face when building modern applications on PostgreSQL, the elephant everyone depends on but few fully leverage. Episode 2: Join Jay Miller, Staff Product Advocate at Aiven, and special guest Alexis Roberson – senior developer educator, and feature flag enthusiast – as they explore how developers can use feature flags to ship faster, reduce risk, and create better user experiences with PostgreSQL-backed applications.

Kyle McCullough, Co-Founder & CTO at OpsHelm, former Head of Infrastructure Engineering at ProdPerfect and Lead Engineer at Vivid Seats, joins host Hugh Evans to explore what it takes to build real-time, multi-cloud streaming infrastructure at scale. As Co-Founder and CTO of OpsHelm, Kyle shares how his team processes hundreds of terabytes of cloud events daily, maintaining sub-second visibility while reducing streaming costs by 78% after migrating from MSK and NATS to Aiven Diskless Kafka.

Join host Hugh Evans for a high-energy hour of rapid-fire conversations with experts shaping the future of streaming data. Broadcasting directly from Current 2025 in New Orleans, this episode packs six lightning interviews into one hour, mixing deep technical insights with a few fun surprises along the way. Guests include Olena Kutsenko (Confluent), Ben Gamble (Ververica), Alex Merced (Dremio), Sion Smith (OSO), Zander Matheson (ex-ByteWax, Confluent), Hojjat Jafarpour (DeltaStream), and Tom Scott (Streambased).