Get Kafka-Nated Episode 1

Aiven

Nov 24, 2025

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.

What we’ll cover in episode 1:
Early days: Starting as an internal tool for LinkedIn how has Kafka become the backbone of modern infrastructure?
Major Architectural Shifts: How major changes like KIP-500 (removing Zookeeper) and now KIP-1150 (diskless topics) reflect the changing demands on streaming infrastructure.
Enterprise Adoption Patterns: In 12 years of working with Kafka Filip will discuss how enterprise adoption has changed, and how the problems that existed in 2012 were different from those in 2025.
The Innovation Cycles: Kafka has gone through distinct phases - early adoption, enterprise scaling, cloud-native transformation. What drives these major shifts, and what stage we’re in now.

Timestamp:

0:00 Intro & welcome

0:41 Guest intro – Filip Yunov from Aiven

1:47 The early days of Kafka

3:51 Kafka’s evolution to event streaming

6:07 Replication, cloud costs & modern challenges

8:30 Key KIPs: ZooKeeper removal & tiered storage

12:33 Diskless Kafka (KIP-1150) & the future of storage

16:05 Balancing innovation with reliability

21:42 The future of Kafka: multi-tenancy, queues & elasticity

31:44 Why Kafka still matters + closing remarks

Learn more about Aiven for Apache Kafka: https://aiven.io/kafka
Learn more about Aiven Inkless: https://aiven.io/inkless
Read this blog: Apache Kafka simply explained: https://aiven.io/blog/kafka-simply-explained
Watch more episodes of Get Kafka-Nated on YouTube: Aiven YouTube Channel
#apachekafka #datastreaming #aiven #GetKafkaNated #opensource

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GitHub: https://github.com/aiven
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