Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this episode of Get Kafka-Nated, host Hugh is joined by Anatolii Popov, Senior Software Engineer at Aiven, to dive into one of the most talked-about integrations in the modern data stack: Kafka to Apache Iceberg. Anatolii was accepted to speak at Iceberg Summit 2026 on debugging the Kafka Connect Iceberg Connector, and in this session we’ll cover the talk he would have given, including common failure modes, debugging locally, catalog complexities, and where the integration is heading next.

Join Jeff Mery and Josep Prat as they discuss the future of Kafka and Streaming. In this deep dive, we break down the architectural shifts and hidden "taxes" currently hitting the data streaming ecosystem—and how to engineer your way out of them. In this video, you’ll see: The "Streaming Tax" Breakdown: A transparent look at how 3x replication, inter-AZ egress, and eCKU markups are inflating your TCO by up to 500%.

In this episode, we sit down with Viktor Somogyi-Vass, a veteran of the Kafka ecosystem who recently joined Aiven after nearly a decade at Cloudera. Viktor shares his journey from becoming an Apache Kafka Committer to tackling the most complex challenges in modern cloud-native streaming. We dive deep into the architectural shift from traditional data centers to the cloud, exploring how Diskless Kafka (Disaggregated Storage) is slashing costs and why KIP-1134 is the next frontier for true multi-tenancy.

Viktor Kessler is both co-founder of Vakamo, a company specialising in governance for Iceberg, and a major contributor to Lakekeeper, an open-source Iceberg REST catalog. His contributions to the Iceberg aren’t limited to pull requests: Viktor is also the organiser of the Apache Iceberg Meetup Europe and hosted some fantastic events in 2025 that brought the Iceberg community together all over Europe from Dublin to Vilnius.

Join us for A Kristmas Kafka, an informal and deeply technical roundtable with Apache Kafka committers, contributors and community leaders. This conversation brings together the people closest to the Kafka codebase to reflect on where the project started, how it has evolved and what lies ahead for streaming systems.