News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
Practical guidance on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
Kafka use cases
The production Kafka use cases with the numbers behind them: real-time analytics, event-driven microservices, change data capture, event sourcing and log aggregation, plus the business case for each.
Kafka KRaft
KRaft replaces ZooKeeper with a Raft quorum built into Kafka. The migration path and deadlines, controller sizing, the real scale limits, and day-2 operations for KRaft clusters.
ksqlDB on Kafka
ksqlDB is the streaming SQL layer for Kafka: streams and tables in SQL, persistent queries with state in internal topics. The push-vs-pull trap, and where it stands as Confluent shifts to Flink.
Kafka with Spring Boot
Spring Boot integrates with Kafka through spring-kafka: KafkaTemplate, @KafkaListener and auto-configuration. Production setup, dead letter topics, non-blocking retries, and listener tuning.
Dead letter queues in Kafka: a consumer-side, Kafka-only approach
How to implement dead letter queues in Kafka: consumer-side, Kafka-only, scoped per consumer group, and why retry topics for transient failures are an anti-pattern.
What is Apache Kafka?
Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform that stores records in ordered, partitioned, replayable logs. This is what it is, how the pieces fit, and when to choose it.
Best free Kafka UI tools in 2026
Compare the best free Kafka UI and management tools in 2026: Kpow Community Edition, Conduktor Console Community, Lenses Community Edition, AKHQ, and Kafbat UI.
Clone to topic for DLQs in Apache Kafka
Learn about Clone to Topic, the latest feature available in Kpow 96.2, enabling you to replay Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) records inside a governed UI.
Kafdrop: pricing and alternatives
Kafdrop review for 2026: strengths, limitations, pricing, and the best alternatives for platform and data engineers running production Kafka clusters.