Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Grab your cup and prepare to Get Kafka-Nated! In this series, we’ll be digging into everything Apache Kafka, from the pre-history of Kafka to the latest Kafka Improvement Proposal (KIP). We’ll be joined by a range of guests who have been at the forefront of Kafka for many years.

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.

Get Kafka-Nated Ep. 10 Wednesday, November 5th 2025 Guest Focus: Co-Founder & CTO at OpsHelm, former Head of Infrastructure Engineering at ProdPerfect and Lead Engineer at Vivid Seats Kyle McCullough joins host Hugh Evans to explore what it takes to build real-time, multi-cloud streaming infrastructure at scale. As Co-Founder and CTO of OpsHelm, Kyle shares how his team processes hundreds of terabytes of cloud events daily, maintaining sub-second visibility while reducing streaming costs by 78% after migrating from MSK and NATS to Aiven Diskless Kafka.

Get Kafka-Nated: Live from Current (New Orleans) Thursday, October 30th, 2025 10:00–11:00 AM CDT Broadcasting Live from the Aiven booth at Current 2025 We’re shaking things up for a special live edition of Get Kafka-Nated! 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.

Get Kafka-Nated Ep. 8 Wednesday, October 15th 2025 Guest Focus: Founder of ShadowTraffic, former Confluent stream-processing lead (Kafka Streams, ksqlDB), creator of the Onyx Platform Michael Drogalis joins host Hugh Evans to unpack one of the toughest challenges in stream processing: creating realistic synthetic test data for Kafka. Michael founded ShadowTraffic after leading Kafka Streams and ksqlDB at Confluent and building open-source stream systems like Onyx.

Behind every incident is a team working to make things right. Get to know some of the engineers who worked behind the scenes to help resolve the August 28th Kafka service disruption.

In this talk, we’ll introduce the Kafka Data Source plugin we developed for Grafana, which enables users to query and visualise Kafka topic data directly in their dashboards—without the need for intermediate storage or external services. We'll share how the idea came about, how we collaborated with the Grafana community and developers to bring it to life, and the challenges we faced along the way. We'll also discuss our vision for the plugin’s future and its role in the evolving observability landscape.