My Data Streaming Journey with Kafka and Flink - 7 Years at Confluent
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My Data Streaming Journey with Kafka & Flink: 7 Years at Confluent

Time flies… I joined Confluent seven years ago when Apache Kafka was mainly used by a few tech giants and the company had ~100 employees. This blog post explores my data streaming journey, including Kafka becoming a de facto standard for over 100,000 organizations, Confluent doing an IPO on the NASDAQ stock exchange, 5000+ customers adopting a data streaming platform, and emerging new design approaches and technologies like data mesh, GenAI, and Apache Flink. I look at the past, present and future of my personal data streaming journey. Both, from the evolution of technology trends and the journey as a Confluent employee that started in a Silicon Valley startup and is now part of a global software and cloud company.
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Apache Kafka and Snowflake Cost Efficiency and Data Governance
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Apache Kafka + Flink + Snowflake: Cost Efficient Analytics and Data Governance

Snowflake is a leading cloud data warehouse and transitions into a data cloud that enables various use cases. The major drawback of this evolution is the significantly growing cost of the data processing. This blog post explores how data streaming with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink enables a “shift left architecture” where business teams can reduce cost, provide better data quality, and process data more efficiently. The real-time capabilities and unification of transactional and analytical workloads using Apache Iceberg’s open table format enable new use cases and a best of breed approach without a vendor lock-in and the choice of various analytical query engines like Dremio, Starburst, Databricks, Amazon Athena, Google BigQuery, or Apache Flink.
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The Past Present and Future of Stream Processing
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The Past, Present and Future of Stream Processing

Stream processing has existed for decades. The adoption grows with open source frameworks like Apache Kafka and Flink in combination with fully managed cloud services. This blog post explores the past, present and future of stream processing, including the relation of machine learning and GenAI, streaming databases, and the integration between data streaming and data lakes with Apache Iceberg.
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ESG and Sustainability powered by Data Streaming with Apache Kafka and Flink
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Green Data, Clean Insights: How Kafka and Flink Power ESG Transformations

This blog post explores the synergy between Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles and Kafka and Flink’s real-time data processing capabilities, unveiling a powerful alliance that transforms intentions into impactful change. Beyond just buzzwords, real-world deployments architectures across industries show the value of data streaming for better ESG ratings.
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GenAI Demo with Kafka, Flink, LangChain and OpenAI
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GenAI Demo with Kafka, Flink, LangChain and OpenAI

Generative AI (GenAI) enables automation and innovation across industries. This blog post explores a simple but powerful architecture and demo for the combination of Python, and LangChain with OpenAI LLM, Apache Kafka for event streaming and data integration, and Apache Flink for stream processing. The use case shows how data streaming and GenAI help to correlate data from Salesforce CRM, searching for lead information in public datasets like Google and LinkedIn, and recommending ice-breaker conversations for sales reps.
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Top 5 Trends for Data Streaming with Kafka and Flink in 2024

Do you wonder about my predicted TOP 5 data streaming trends with Apache Kafka and Flink in 2024 to set data in motion? Discover new technology trends and best practices for event-driven architectures, including data sharing, data contracts, serverless stream processing, multi-cloud architectures, and GenAI.
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The State of Data Streaming for Healthcare in 2023 with Apache Kafka and Flink
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The State of Data Streaming for Healthcare with Apache Kafka and Flink

This blog post explores the state of data streaming for the healthcare industry powered by Apache Kafka and Apache Flink. IT modernization and innovation with pioneering technologies like sensors, telemedicine, or AI/machine learning are explored. I look at enterprise architectures and customer stories from Humana, Recursion, BHG (former Bankers Healthcare Group), and more. A complete slide deck and on-demand video recording are included.
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Policy Enforcement and Data Quality for Apache Kafka with Schema Registry
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Policy Enforcement and Data Quality for Apache Kafka with Schema Registry

Good data quality is one of the most critical requirements in decoupled architectures, like microservices or data mesh. Apache Kafka became the de facto standard for these architectures. But Kafka is a dumb broker that only stores byte arrays. The Schema Registry enforces message structures. This blog post looks at enhancements to leverage data contracts for policies and rules to enforce good data quality on field-level and advanced use cases like routing malicious messages to a dead letter queue.
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Real-Time Advertising Platform with Apache Kafka and Flink
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How to Build a Real-Time Advertising Platform with Apache Kafka and Flink

An advertising platform requires real-time capabilities to provide dynamic targeting, ad personalization, ad fraud detection, budget allocation, and event-driven marketing. This blog post explores how data streaming with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink enables context-specific advertising at any scale. Real-world success stories from Pinterest, Uber, Unity, buzzwil, and TV-Insight show different solutions and architectures for serving ads in marketing campaigns, embedded into mobile apps, and as SaaS software products.
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