Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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).

Michael Drogalis, founder of ShadowTraffic and former Confluent stream-processing lead, joins Hugh Evans to tackle one of the hardest problems in Kafka: generating realistic synthetic test data. From his work on Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, and the Onyx platform, Michael shares practical insights for engineering teams struggling with testing and demo data at scale.

Join Hugh Evans on Get KafkaNated as he sits down with Tristan Stevens, VP of Global Customer Success at Redpanda Data and former Cloudera streaming expert. Tristan shares his unique perspective on the evolution of streaming infrastructure, drawing from years of experience leading customer success in both Hadoop ecosystems and next-generation streaming platforms.

Hounded with operational overhead and slow queries? Learn how to fetch data faster and simplify database management with Aiven for PostgreSQL. Aiven’s fully managed PostgreSQL service delivers high performance, automated scaling, and built-in resilience - without the headaches of manual setup and maintenance. Discover how to optimise queries, reduce latency, and stay focused on building your applications instead of managing infrastructure.

Aiven for ClickHouse is back - better, faster, and stronger than ever. Explore how its new capabilities make it easier to build real-time analytics pipelines, handle massive query workloads, and extract insights at scale. Whether you’re streaming events, powering dashboards, or running analytics applications, Aiven for ClickHouse helps you move from data to decisions in record time.

Learn how to stream data from Kafka into ClickHouse using Aiven’s integration wizard. In this demo, we show you how to generate sample logistics data in Kafka, configure the integration to map Avro-formatted fields, and connect to ClickHouse to view and query the ingested data. We also demonstrate how to create a materialised view in ClickHouse to store and query streamed data efficiently, making real-time analytics fast and easy.

Join Hugh Evans as he chats with Ben Gamble, Field CTO at Ververica and one of the original creators of Apache Flink, about the magic of combining Kafka and Flink for modern streaming analytics.

In this episode, Hugh Evans sits down with Satish D, senior engineer at Uber and a driving force behind KIP-405, to unpack tiered storage in Apache Kafka. We go beyond the basics to explore the real challenges, design decisions, and community collaboration that made this architectural change possible.

Join Hugh Evans and Alex Merced from Dremio as they explore the future of streaming data with Apache Iceberg. In this episode, we dive into how Iceberg is transforming the way data lakes work, making it easier for engineers to manage, query, and stream data efficiently.