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Articles by Tim Berglund
How the Data Streaming Community Is Evolving
Jan 13, 2026Read Time: 4 min Jan 13, 2026Read Time: 4 min As the successor to Kafka Summit, Current is critically important to everyone who works in data streaming. I’ve been involved with this series of events in one way or another since 2017, and I couldn’t be happier to still be on the bus as we begin 2026. Just as the surrounding community is growing, Current is growing with it. Ten years ago, Kafka Summit was laser-focused on Apache Kafka®.
What Data Streaming Engineers Learned at Current 2024
We covered so much at Current 2024, from the 138 breakout sessions, lightning talks, and meetups on the expo floor to what happened on the main stage. If you heard any snippets or saw quotes from the Day 2 keynote, then you already know what I told the room: We are all data streaming engineers now.Ā Why? Because of a historic paradigm shift thatās been in progress for more than a decade.
Creating an Atmosphere of Psychological Safety
Transcript Berglund: It's important whether you're a leader or an individual contributor, a formal manager or an individual contributor, this is the thing that you can drive, and I think that that matters. This is a part of an environment that you almost certainly want. You want this to be true of the place that you work, really, regardless of what you do. Even if you're not a developer at all, this is important for any team communication.
Here Are the Top 10 Takeaways from Nearly 200 Kafka Experts
December 28, 2021 Many leading lights of the Apache Kafka® community have appeared as guests on Streaming Audio at one time or another in the past three years. But some of its episodes are particularly memorable—and each for its own reasons. Read on for the 10 episodes that I consider particularly worth listening (or relistening) to, along with a key fact from each. Apache Kafka Fundamentals: The Concept of Streams and Tables ft.
What is Kafka Connect? Basic Fundamentals and Architecture
September 29, 2021 Apache Kafka® is an enormously successful piece of data infrastructure, functioning as the ubiquitous distributed log underlying the modern enterprise. It is scalable, available as a managed service, and has simple APIs available in pretty much any language you want. But as much as Kafka does a good job as the central nervous system of your company’s data, there are so many systems that are not Kafka that you still have to talk to.
Kafka Summit Americas 2021 Recap
September 16, 2021 The full inventory of three online Kafka Summits in 2021 is now complete. Kafka Summit Americas wrapped just yesterday. Being a part of the event team and the Program Committee, I can say it’s been an exhilarating process to be involved with all three Summits. I hope you as community members and attendees have benefitted even more! Since last year’s Summit, the world has adapted to online conferences, perhaps to a fault.
Connecting Azure Cosmos DB With Apache Kafka ft. Ryan CrawCour
Introduction When building solutions for customers in Microsoft Azure, it is not uncommon to come across customers who are deeply entrenched in the Apache Kafka® ecosystem and want to continue expanding within it. Thus, figuring out how to connect Azure first-party services to this ecosystem is of the utmost importance.
Highlights from Kafka Summit Europe 2021
May 18, 2021 And that’s a wrap on Kafka Summit Europe 2021, the first of three global Kafka Summits this year. We’ve seen 17,000 registrations from over 7,000 companies and 137 different countries. All of us—organizers, sponsors, and attendees—are getting good at this online conference game, and while we look forward to whatever hybrid new world next year might bring, for this year, we’re still grateful for being able to do this event online together as we have.
Kafka Summit Europe 2021 is Coming! Get a Peek at the Agenda
March 4, 2021 As you may have heard, we are hosting not one, not two, but three Kafka Summits in 2021. No matter where you are in the world, there’s a Summit event that will fall into your daytime schedule, or at least part of it. When we say we value the health of the Kafka Community, we mean your sleep too. Kicking off the year is Kafka Summit Europe 2021 on May 11–12. This is a virtual event, like all of the year’s Summits.
Intro To Apache Kafka: How Kafka Works
Introduction We recently published a series of tutorial videos and tweets on the Apache Kafka® platform. So now you know there’s a thing called Kafka, but before you put your hands to the keyboard and start writing code, you need to form a mental model of what the thing is. These videos give you the basics you need to know to have the broad grasp on Kafka necessary to continue learning and eventually start coding. This article summarizes those videos.
12 Days of Apache Kafka
Before you say it: Yes, we are right now three days past Christmas, but technically the 12 days of Christmas refer to the days between Christmas and Epiphany, which is—I checked the math—on January 6th (which means you need to keep reading). We recently published a series of tutorial videos and tweets on the Apache Kafka® platform as we see it.
Kafka Summit 2021 - Double the Fun
November 17, 2020 My own sense of the passage of time in 2020 is no sure guide, but honestly it seems like Kafka Summit just happened—yet here we are, deep into planning for Kafka Summit 2021! We had over 35,000 people registered for the August event from more than 10,000 companies and 140 countries around the world. That’s a lot of numbers, all of which suggest that the next Summit is going to be even better.
Kafka: A Modern Distributed System
Transcript Berglund: I am Tim Berglund. I'm here to talk to you today about Kafka as a distributed system. I work for a company called Confluent. We make a cloud service and an event streaming platform that's based on Apache Kafka. I spend most of my time talking about Kafka itself and the architectures that are arising around event-driven things and around events. There's a lot of exciting things to talk about. Today, a little bit different. Who uses Kafka right now? Who is new to Kafka?
Real-Time Data Streaming, Kafka and Analytics Part 3: Effective Planning for Data Streaming Improves Data Analytics
Data stream processing is defined as a system performing transformations for creating analytics on data inside a stream. In Part 1 of this series, we defined data streaming to provide an understanding of its importance. In Part 2, we got a bit more technical in explaining data integration and ingestion into one of the more popular stream platforms, Apache Kafka.
Real-time Data Streaming, Kafka,and Analytics Part 2: Going Beyond Pure Streaming
Data transaction streaming is managed through many platforms, with one of the most common being Apache Kafka. In our first article in this data streaming series, we delved into the definition of data transaction and streaming and why it is critical to manage information in real-time for the most accurate analytics. As more individuals increase their data literacy and use data to make business decisions, real-time data is becoming a critical factor.
Real-Time Data Streaming, Kafka, and Analytics Part One: Data Streaming 101
(spainter_vfx/Shutterstock) The terms “real-time data” and “streaming data” are the latest catch phrases being bandied about by almost every data vendor and company. Everyone wants the world to know that they have access to and are using the latest, greatest data for making business decisions. But using the term is not enough. Do your business executives and users know what data streaming is, where the information comes from and why it is important?
Introducing Confluent Hub
Today we’re delighted to announce the launch of Confluent Hub. Confluent Hub is a place for the Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform community to come together and share the components the community needs to build better streaming data pipelines and event-driven applications. Of course, “component” can mean a lot of things, so we should be more specific.
The Rime of the Product Manager
After I wrote The Maven, I started thinking about what poem I would hack next. I didn’t intend to land on another Romantic–allegedly I do not even like the Romantics very much–but then the title just came to me one day. I want to say “and then the rest happened quickly,” but in fact principal photography took place over a total of four days spread over more than two years.
Distributed Systems in One Lesson
Simple tasks like running a program or storing and retrieving data become much more complicated when you do them on collections of computers, rather than single machines. Distributed systems have become a key architectural construct, but they affect everything a program would normally do.
Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon New York 2013
@rundavidrun: Data policies on mobile/cloud increasingly controlled by vendors. We trust them in a feudal way to protect it. @bruce_schneier #qconnewyork @rundavidrun: Technology makes entities more powerful. Speed magnifies its effectiveness. Who enforces their responsibility? @bruce_schneier #qconnewyork @tedoutloud: We live in a world of ubiquitous surveillance.
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