Get Kafka-Nated Ep 8: Realistic Synthetic Streaming Data w/ Michael Drogalis

Get Kafka-Nated Ep. 8

Wednesday, October 15th 2025

16:00 BST

17:00 CEST

11:00 EDT

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.

What we’ll cover:

• Why generating realistic test data for Kafka is uniquely hard
• The “$10,000 demo problem” and what it really costs teams
• Designing ShadowTraffic’s declarative JSON DSL: trade-offs & performance
• Maintaining referential integrity & state across topics at scale
• Modeling real-world patterns: bursty traffic, seasonality & correlated events
• What engineering leaders should consider when building or buying synthetic data tools

If you’ve got topics you’d like us to explore, want to be a guest on the show, or have feedback on today’s episode, reach out. We’re always looking for new voices and perspectives from the Kafka community.