Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Skills as Guardrails: Contributing to Apache Kafka with AI, Without Knowing Every Module

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.

The AI Technologies That Will Change Business Over the Next Five Years

Artificial intelligence is no longer viewed as an experimental technology reserved for large enterprises. It has become an essential business tool that helps organizations automate processes, analyze information, improve customer experiences, and make faster decisions. Over the next five years, AI will continue evolving beyond simple automation into systems capable of reasoning, collaborating, and independently managing increasingly complex workflows.

Where Historians Fall Short for Physical AI

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.

What's New in InfluxDB 3.11: A Significant Performance Upgrade for Complex Time Series Workloads

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.

AI-Powered Spacecraft Operations with InfluxDB 3

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 LTS: Full-Text Search, Async Inserts, and Materialized CTEs

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.

PGVector Isn't Your Vector Databasing Cure-All - and That's Fine

Occasionally, I get asked, "is pgvector enough for Enterprise AI Solutions or should I migrate to a dedicated vector database?" The honest answer is No Create EXTENSION vector; ALONE is not going to solve your solution for enterprise AI. That being said, I don't think you're asking the right question. The better question is, "does a dedicated vector database make sense for my workload or would pgvector suffice?".

Real-Time Satellite Monitoring with InfluxDB 3 & Claude

See how InfluxData built an AI-powered satellite fleet dashboard using InfluxDB 3 Enterprise. Head of Product Marketing Ryan Nelson demonstrates how the system handles high-cardinality telemetry and burst ingestion, detects anomalies in real time, and connects live operational data to Claude through the InfluxDB 3 MCP server. The result is faster fleet-wide analysis, reliable telemetry ingestion, and an integrated workflow for anomaly detection, investigation, and response.

Aiven Acquires Flow AI to Bring Agent Infrastructure Closer to Production Data

Helsinki, Finland — Aiven has acquired Flow AI, a company building infrastructure for production-grade analytical AI agents. The integration of Flow AI technology will accelerate Aiven's product roadmap and make it easier for customers to securely and scalably run production AI applications and agents next to their data.