Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Right Size Your Model Usage with Valkey and Semantic Routing

Benchmarks keep showing that picking the right LLM is hard. The easy answer is "just use the most powerful one." That works, but it is pricey. A small, cheap, or local model can handle many simple requests just as well as a frontier model, for a fraction of the cost. That is what semantic routing is for. Use middleware that looks at an incoming request and decides which model should answer it.

Apache Kafka Share Groups are NOT true queues. Here's why that's a good thing.

This Spring, the Apache Kafka community released version 4.2 with a “production-ready” Share Group feature. Also known as a “Kafka queue” people were eager to see this feature because it introduced elastic consumer scaling, individual message acknowledgments, and built-in "poison pill" handling; similar to what you'd find in traditional message brokers like RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ.

Building an AI Ready Data Backbone: Dima Kan at AICamp 2026

The Aiven Platform is more than a collection of open source services for streaming, storing and analyzing data. The platform ensures that all services run reliably and securely in the clouds of your choice, are observable, and can easily be integrated with each other and with external 3rd party tools.

Aiven for Valkey Dev Tier is Live #aiven #valkey #developer

You're gonna want a cache. Aiven for Valkey's Dev Tier gets you 2 CPUs and 4 GB RAM on a single node, with automated backups, full monitoring (metrics + logs), and basic support included. JSON, Bloom filters, and Search come pre-enabled. AIVEN DATA PLATFORM The Aiven Platform is more than a collection of open source services for streaming, storing and analyzing data. The platform ensures that all services run reliably and securely in the clouds of your choice, are observable, and can easily be integrated with each other and with external 3rd party tools.

Get Kafka-Nated S2E6: Omnia Ibrahim - KIP-1279, Cross-Cluster Replication

Nobody has much nice to say about MirrorMaker. Cross-cluster replication has been one of Kafka's sore spots for years, and KIP-1279 is the community's attempt to finally fix it. This episode I'm joined by Omnia Ibrahim, Software Engineer at Apple and Apache Kafka Committer, to talk about what's actually broken in multi-cluster Kafka today, what KIP-1279 changes, and what teams running active-active or active-passive setups should do in the meantime.

Prototyping For Free, Scaling For Cheap with Aiven Dev Tier

I’ve been active in technical communities like PyData and codebar across the UK for nearly a decade now and owe much of my career to meeting and learning from cool people at events. Now, as someone with a professional interest in community organising, I spend a lot of my time looking for events to sponsor or speak at. But whilst finding technical events and communities can be tricky, I think I’ve found a solution using Kafka that might be useful for you too.

Mirror, Cut Over, Move On: A Live Kafka Migration from Confluent to Aiven

Kafka migrations get talked about like they're impossible. They aren't. They're a sequence of decisions, preparations, and good compromises - plus a working playbook. In this session, Dirk runs a real Confluent Cloud-to-Aiven migration live. Top to bottom: target Kafka cluster deployment, MirrorMaker 2 setup, replication flow and offset handling, and a staged cutover that keeps producer and consumer downtime to almost zero.

Context is King #5 - Ontologies as Executable Context for AI Agents

Can a knowledge graph do more than store facts — can it actually run your agent? In this talk from Context is King in London, Teodoro Baldazzi (Principal AI Engineer at Prometheux) makes the case for ontologies as executable context: structured knowledge that doesn't just inform AI agents, but actively shapes how they reason and act. Context is King is a meetup series co-organized by Flow AI and Aiven for engineers shipping AI agents in production. No pitches — just real implementation stories.

Context is King #5 - A Semantic Layer for the Agentic Era

Agents are only as good as the queries they can run. In this talk from Context is King in London, Egor Kraev (Co-Founder & CTO of Motley) breaks down how a well-designed semantic layer becomes the connective tissue between natural language intent and reliable data retrieval. Context is King is a meetup series co-organized by Flow AI and Aiven for engineers shipping AI agents in production. No pitches — just real implementation stories.