Deeply saddened by the passing of the legendary tabla maestro, Ustad Zakir Hussain Ji. He will be remembered as a true genius who revolutionized the world of Indian classical music. He also brought the tabla to the global stage, captivating millions with his unparalleled rhythm.

I'm enjoying putting the finishing touches on my next blog post on the Why, When, and How of Kafka applications. It's a distillation of my point of view from a decade in the space and I hope it's as useful to read as it was fun to write. Coming Tuesday!

Should you use Kafka? If so, when? And what are the tradeoffs presented by the dizzying variety of Kafka-adjacent technologies? I hope that my latest blog post provides unique and useful answers to these questions. Let me know what you all think! 👉responsive.dev/blog/why-when-…

#StreamProcessing with Kafka Streams

The 2025 blog post series has begun and we're kicking things off with the "official" Kafka Streams upgrade-guide -- check it out for best practices when setting up a new app, rules for safe vs unsafe upgrades, and tips for making the process go smoothly: responsive.dev/blog/topology-…

Next entry in the Kafka Streams 101 series: application lifecycle. Very beginner friendly, but even the pros might find a useful tip or two -- for example: have you heard of the new standby task listener? Check it out: responsive.dev/blog/app-lifec…

This week in our Kafka Streams 101 series, Sophie Blee-Goldman dives deep into the world of performance optimization. This isn't just theory: she shows how we realized 10x throughput improvements by implementing these techniques in prod! responsive.dev/blog/performan…

It was great to chat with Kostas Pardalis . You can find the episode here: techontherocks.show/15

SlateDB 0.6.0 is out! github.com/slatedb/slated… Highlights include a hybrid cache (using Foyer), a lot of internal cleanup, and more groundwork for transactions. Oh, and put performance jumped ~80% for write-heavy workloads :) slatedb.io/performance/be…

Great talk by Metronome infra TL Nick Dellamaggiore & Responsive CEO Apurva Mehta at Netflix's Open Data Forum yesterday! They shared how we built the world’s largest Kafka exactly-once deployment + scaled with disaggregated state storage. Glad to talk about this publicly more

The most surprising thing I’ve learned in the past couple of years spent talking to several dozens of companies building apps on Kafka is this: the plain old producer and consumer remains the most popular interface for building apps on Kafka. Many companies I spoke to have even

Friday humor: What developers really think of their technology choices for building apps on Kafka ..

What do people actually want to do with Kafka? Here I present the Kafka User’s Hierarchy of Needs based on conversations I’ve had over the years. The hierarchy goes from the most basic use cases at the bottom to the most sophisticated at the top. Here’s how I define these use

Chris This feels pretty on-point to me on two things: 1) the producer/consumer is by far the most popular 'stream processor' on Kafka. 2) When I speak with people, the most cited problems with the Kafka stack have to do with the limits of the Kafka protocol itself. (1/2)

We have been using SlateDB for a long time in Tensorlake ! If you parse a Document with the ingestion API, some of the real time job scheduling data gets stored in S3, and we are able to scale the API to 10s of 1000s of documents in real time!