Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

In Episode 3 of Elephant in the Room, we move from discussion to delivery with a hands-on, live build of a real, community-focused application. Join Jay Miller, Abigail Mesrenyame Dogbe and Andres Pineda as they collaboratively design and build a CFP (Call for Proposals) review platform using PostgreSQL and Django. The aim: create a practical tool that helps speakers receive better feedback and helps organisers discover new and diverse voices.

Why are today’s AI data architectures broken? Giannis Polyzos and Hugh Evans unpack what’s failing.

Giannis Polyzos joins Hugh Evans to challenge the idea of choosing technology based on popularity.

Tired of not knowing why your home lab containers are crashing? In this video, we’ll walk through how to set up a consolidated logging pipeline using Aiven for PostgreSQL (with TimescaleDB), Fluentd and Grafana — all running on my upgraded Mac Mini home lab. The key insight: never keep your troubleshooting tools on the same machine that's giving you problems!

In this episode, we sit down with Viktor Kessler, co-founder of Vakamo, major contributor to Lakekeeper, and organiser of Apache Iceberg Meetup Europe, to explore the evolving world of Apache Iceberg. From architectural deep dives to open-source governance, Viktor shares insights from building an Iceberg REST catalog in Rust, launching a company around open data governance and growing the European Iceberg community from Dublin to Vilnius.

In Episode 4 of Elephant in the Room, we tackle a question many teams struggle with: how do you protect sensitive customer data from your own developers while still running and improving your web application? Join Jay Miller (Aiven) and Tim Schilling of Djangonaut Space as they explore a real-world privacy challenge. Djangonaut Space’s application process requires collecting personal information from applicants, but reviewers and contributors should not have access to identifying details. The goal: enable fair review and active development without exposing sensitive data.