Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Nobody has much nice to say about MirrorMaker. Cross-cluster replication has been one of Kafka's sore spots for years, and KIP-1279 is the community's attempt to finally fix it. This episode I'm joined by Omnia Ibrahim, Software Engineer at Apple and Apache Kafka Committer, to talk about what's actually broken in multi-cluster Kafka today, what KIP-1279 changes, and what teams running active-active or active-passive setups should do in the meantime.

Kafka migrations get talked about like they're impossible. They aren't. They're a sequence of decisions, preparations, and good compromises - plus a working playbook. In this session, Dirk runs a real Confluent Cloud-to-Aiven migration live. Top to bottom: target Kafka cluster deployment, MirrorMaker 2 setup, replication flow and offset handling, and a staged cutover that keeps producer and consumer downtime to almost zero.

Want to build context-aware AI agents with production-ready databases? In this video, we dive into the brand-new Aiven MCP (Model Context Protocol) and show you how to instantly connect your AI assistants to fully managed PostgreSQL and Apache Kafka with zero custom code!

Can a knowledge graph do more than store facts — can it actually run your agent? In this talk from Context is King in London, Teodoro Baldazzi (Principal AI Engineer at Prometheux) makes the case for ontologies as executable context: structured knowledge that doesn't just inform AI agents, but actively shapes how they reason and act. Context is King is a meetup series co-organized by Flow AI and Aiven for engineers shipping AI agents in production. No pitches — just real implementation stories.

Agents are only as good as the queries they can run. In this talk from Context is King in London, Egor Kraev (Co-Founder & CTO of Motley) breaks down how a well-designed semantic layer becomes the connective tissue between natural language intent and reliable data retrieval. Context is King is a meetup series co-organized by Flow AI and Aiven for engineers shipping AI agents in production. No pitches — just real implementation stories.

As AI agents gain more autonomy, safety can't be an afterthought. In this talk from Context is King in London, Jonatan von Martens (AI Safety Engineer at ElevenLabs) shares what it actually takes to build agents that behave reliably in production. Context is King is a meetup series co-organized by Flow AI and Aiven for engineers shipping AI agents in production. No pitches — just real implementation stories.

In this episode of Get Kafka-Nated, host Hugh Evans is joined by Stanislav Kozlovski, Apache Kafka committer, independent consultant, and author of 2 Minute Streaming — a newsletter with over 7,000 subscribers. After six years at Confluent, including time on the Kafka Serverless team, Stan went independent and has been writing and consulting full-time. He's one of the most recognised voices in the Kafka community, with over 50k followers across social media. In this session we go somewhere the streaming industry rarely goes honestly: Kafka costs.

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%.

March 11th, 4PM GMT Yingjun Wu is the founder and CEO of RisingWave Labs, a company building a distributed SQL database for stream processing, with over a decade of experience spanning academic research and large-scale production systems. In this episode we'll be sitting down for a coffee and a conversation with Yingjun's about what a streaming database actually is, how message brokers and streaming databases fit together in real-world architectures, and what his journey from database researcher to founder has taught him.