Confluent By The Bay
- Oli Dinov
- Aug 23
- 3 min read
Confluent isn’t just a company we work with—they’re friends. Our friendship started more than ten years ago, and over the years, their team has become a familiar and welcome presence at our events.
One of Confluent’s brightest stars is Viktor Gamov. He first joined us back in 2020 with his livestream Event Streaming with Kafka Streams, showing how Kafka makes it easier to handle constantly changing data.
This November, Viktor is back with a talk: The Missing Protocol: How MCP Bridges LLMs and Data Streams. He’ll explore a challenge we’ve all seen: AI agents often work great in demos but stumble when facing live, real-time data. MCP changes that, letting agents connect directly to streaming data, understand evolving schemas, and react to events as they happen.
In 2023, we were excited to welcome Danica Fine, who brought a refreshing, hands-on session with a twist: Practical Pipelines: A Houseplant Alerting System with ksqlDB. Sensor data was streamed, transformed, and pushed to Telegram in real time—turning a common problem into a practical streaming solution. A hands-on example of how event-driven pipelines can start at home, not just in production.
2018 was a standout year for Confluent with a stellar lineup of speakers. We had the rare opportunity to hear from Neha Narkhede, co-creator of Apache Kafka and co-founder of Confluent, who spoke about identifying events at the source—within apps and data streams—and why event-driven thinking is key to handling continuously evolving data in modern systems.
Another highlight was a hands-on technical session from Gwen Shapira and Matthias J. Sax: Deploying Kafka Streams Applications with Docker and Kubernetes.They demonstrated how Kafka Streams applications can be dynamically scaled on Kubernetes, with state migration handled transparently. Their live demo showed how to deploy, manage, and scale Kafka Streams apps using containers—turning complex architecture into something both scalable and manageable.
And going further back, in 2016, we were delighted to welcome Jay Kreps, co-creator of Apache Kafka and co-founder of Confluent, for a keynote on: Apache Kafka, Stream Processing, and Microservices. Jay made the case for Kafka as the foundation of asynchronous, event-driven microservices and introduced Kafka Streams as a native stream processing library built into the Kafka platform—connecting service design with real-time data architectures.
What They're Doing Now
Confluent is on a mission to create the foundational platform for data in motion—acting like a central nervous system that lets organizations connect, process, and react to real-time data across their businesses. Their cloud-native streaming platform is designed to handle streaming data seamlessly, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments.
Latest highlights:
Confluent Platform 8.0 (June 2025) introduces major innovations. The platform powers real-world business agility—enabling companies like EVO Banco and Bank Rakyat Indonesia to deploy real-time fraud detection, and helping firms like Bitvavo, Swiggy, Sencrop, Citizens Bank, and GEP to gain real-time insights, improve customer experiences, and streamline operations—all thanks to Confluent’s flexible streaming architecture:
KRaft (no ZooKeeper): simplifies Kafka’s architecture by internally managing metadata, making deployments leaner and more scalable.
Client-side field-level encryption: provides granular security by encrypting individual message fields—complementing existing enterprise-grade protections like TLS and role-based access control.
Enhanced monitoring and deployment via the next-gen Confluent Control Center and improved automation tools including Ansible.
The platform powers real-world business agility—enabling companies like EVO Banco and Bank Rakyat Indonesia to deploy real-time fraud detection, and helping firms like Bitvavo, Swiggy, Sencrop, Citizens Bank, and GEP to gain real-time insights, improve customer experiences, and streamline operations—all thanks to Confluent’s flexible streaming architecture.
Confluent continues innovating on top of open-source Kafka and Flink. Recently, they've integrated Kora engine for simpler, faster streaming, and are actively contributing to making Apache Flink the go-to choice for stream processing
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