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Get Kafka-Nated S2E5: Nobody Understands Kafka Costs

In this episode of Get Kafka-Nated, host Hugh Evans is joined by Stanislav Kozlovski, Apache Kafka committer, independent consultant, and author of 2 Minute Streaming — a newsletter with over 7,000 subscribers. After six years at Confluent, including time on the Kafka Serverless team, Stan went independent and has been writing and consulting full-time. He's one of the most recognised voices in the Kafka community, with over 50k followers across social media. In this session we go somewhere the streaming industry rarely goes honestly: Kafka costs.

A Developer's Guide to Aiven Apps

We recently announced the Limited Availability (LA) launch of Aiven Apps, which lets teams define, run, and scale production-ready, real-time applications using container and Compose-based workflows they already know. It provides a managed, stateless runtime that runs directly inside your data perimeter, letting you deploy applications alongside open-source data services like PostgreSQL and Apache Kafka.

Sustainability as opportunity: a new collaboration between Aiven and OxygenIT

Many businesses see emissions reduction as a cost sink: assigning people, maintaining compliance, the hard labor of calculating carbon signatures. That view is out of date – and a new partnership between Aiven and data provider OxygenIT demonstrates why. Our premise: your carbon footprint isn't just about understanding emissions; it's about understanding your business. Today, we're announcing a new service that helps with both.

Addressing Cold Start problem in Travel Personalization for OTAs

In the high-stakes world of Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) like Expedia, Hopper, Priceline, and Airbnb, seconds matter. A traveler searching for a "beachfront stay in Hawaii" isn't just looking for a room — they are reacting to weather changes, fluctuating flight prices, and social media trends. Traditional travel platforms often rely on stale data: yesterday's search history or last week's preferences. To truly compete, travel platforms must pivot to Real-Time Context Engineering.

What 16,808 Kafka Clusters Tell Us About Data Streaming

Half a year ago, we launched a free tier cloud Kafka. We have 16,808 clusters so we got curious: what are these builders telling us about the state of Apache Kafka? The headlines this quarter suggest Kafka is dying because the streaming market is consolidating. At Aiven we see the opposite. Kafka is not shrinking. It is spreading outward from enterprise platform teams into the hands of individual builders. We are now seeing >200 new Kafka clusters created per day on the free tier.