Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Data catalogs are no longer just for compliance - they are the essential context layer for AI. While LLMs are powerful, they fail without the "tribal knowledge" found in metadata. This session explores how to transform your catalog from a static repository into an active nervous system for AI agents.

Some queries are hard to solve with "basic" RAG. When questions require multi-step reasoning, full-document understanding (not just chunks), or aggregating many results that match specific criteria, simple retrieve-and-generate pipelines break down, we need agentic RAG. But this added capability comes at a cost: as agents plan, search, read, and iterate, they quickly use up a lot of context, which both degrades answer quality and increases costs and latency.

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.

The speakers Nikita Varentsov, Director of Engineering at Inkitt and Johan Jern, Co-founder and CTO at Realm will discuss their experiences on building data infrastructure for rapidly scaling companies with open source technologies. The conversation is led by Amine Slimane, Head of Solution Architects at Aiven.

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.

In Episode 3 of Elephant in the Room, we move from theory to practice, building a real, community-focused application live on stream. Join Jay Miller (Aiven), Abigail Dogbe, and Andres Pineda as they collaboratively design and build a CFP (Call for Proposals) review platform using PostgreSQL and Django. The goal: create a practical tool that helps speakers get better feedback on their talks, and helps organizers discover new, diverse voices.

Season 2 of Get Kafka-Nated kicks off with Giannis Polyzos for a deep dive into Fluss and one of the most enduring questions in data infrastructure: streaming vs batch, or both? Drawing on his experience as a member of the Fluss PMC, Giannis breaks down what Fluss is, how it fits into modern lakehouse architectures, and where the lakehouse model is heading as we look toward 2026.

Learn how to securely download and manage Kafka certificates using Aiven for Apache Kafka. In this demo, we’ll walk you through locating your service certificates in the Aiven Console, downloading them safely, as well as using them to authenticate Kafka clients and ensure encrypted communication. We also cover best practices for certificate management to keep your data streaming infrastructure secure and compliant.