News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
Practical guidance on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
Lenses.io review: pricing and alternatives
Lenses.io review for 2026: honest assessment of SQL Studio, deployment complexity, pricing, and when to consider alternatives like Conduktor or Kpow.
Redpanda Console: pricing and alternatives
Redpanda Console reviewed for 2026: features, pricing, limitations, and the best alternatives for engineering teams running Apache Kafka or Redpanda.
Top Kafka UI tools in 2026: a practical comparison
Honest comparison of Kafka UI tools for enterprise teams, evaluating AKHQ, Kafbat, Redpanda Console, Conduktor, Confluent Control Center, and Kpow.
Best practices for Kafka data observability
12 best practices for Kafka data observability covering consumer lag monitoring, schema enforcement, end-to-end auditing, DLQs, and lineage, with an implementation roadmap.
Kafka message size best practice
Kafka's default max message size is about 1 MB (message.max.bytes is 1,048,588 bytes). Which configs to raise, cloud ceilings, and when to use claim-check.
Kafka partition key best practices
How Kafka partition keys work, what makes a good key, and practical guidance on cardinality, hot partitions, compaction, cross-language hashing, and safe key migration.
Kafka cluster management: a practical guide
A practical guide to Kafka cluster management: architecture sizing, day-to-day operations, performance tuning, KRaft migration, and monitoring for production clusters.
Kafka topic partition best practices
Size Kafka topic partitions correctly from day one. Covers the throughput formula, the keyed topic asymmetry, KRaft-era limits, and operational best practices.
The complete guide to Kafka change data capture
Learn how to implement change data capture with Kafka using Debezium. Includes working PostgreSQL CDC examples, architecture patterns, and monitoring.