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If you’re using Apache Kafka for data streaming, then you’re likely to want to take data from one topic and write an amended version of that data to another topic, for instance: for filtering (give me the items that have been delivered), enrichment (add some more information to messages, from another data source) or anomaly detection (show me potential signs of trouble). The premier solution in this space is the Apache Kafka Streams library.

Let me start with something most Kafka contributors think but rarely say out loud: nobody understands all of Kafka. I'm not a core committer and have only contributed a few times, but those contributions I have made have been in part thanks to using coding assistants. There are some issues with this approach though, the Apache Kafka project is huge. It's split into many parts: the core, the server, the client libraries, the streams engine, the storage layer, the consensus code, and more.

Summary Physical AI—machines and industrial systems that sense conditions, reason, and act in the real world—needs two things from operational data: detailed history for training, and real-time telemetry for inference. Traditional data historians weren’t built for either at the speed Physical AI requires. Four gaps result: limited real-time access, compression that strips model-relevant signal, IT/OT fragmentation, and site-by-site architectures.

Summary InfluxDB 3.11 delivers major performance and data management updates for growing time series workloads, with significantly faster queries on recent data, expanded support for wide and ultra-sparse schemas, and a more predictable resource profile under load. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise also adds backup and restore, bulk Parquet import, row-level deletes, and a built-in Explorer UI.

Summary The InfluxDB satellite telemetry demo is a live mission-control application that monitors a simulated fleet of 12 satellites in real-time. It shows how the InfluxDB 3 Processing Engine can detect anomalies as data is written, enrich time series data with third-party data, and power a grounded AI agent using the InfluxDB 3 MCP server to investigate and explain fleet health.

Aiven for ClickHouse 26.3 is now available in Early Availability. This upstream Long-Term Support release makes full-text search generally available, enables asynchronous inserts by default, introduces materialized common table expressions, and brings a wide range of JSON and query-performance improvements. The upstream 26.3 release includes 27 new features and 40 performance optimizations.

TL;DR Agent projects turn into infrastructure projects fast. Managed agent platforms handle memory, integrations, scheduling, and scaling so builders can focus on the agent itself.