Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Welcome to “Elephant in the Room – Presented by Aiven.” In this live series, we dig into the real-world challenges developers face when building modern applications on PostgreSQL, the elephant everyone depends on but few fully leverage. Episode 2: Join Jay Miller, Staff Product Advocate at Aiven, and special guest Alexis Roberson – senior developer educator, and feature flag enthusiast – as they explore how developers can use feature flags to ship faster, reduce risk, and create better user experiences with PostgreSQL-backed applications.

Kyle McCullough, Co-Founder & CTO at OpsHelm, former Head of Infrastructure Engineering at ProdPerfect and Lead Engineer at Vivid Seats, joins host Hugh Evans to explore what it takes to build real-time, multi-cloud streaming infrastructure at scale. As Co-Founder and CTO of OpsHelm, Kyle shares how his team processes hundreds of terabytes of cloud events daily, maintaining sub-second visibility while reducing streaming costs by 78% after migrating from MSK and NATS to Aiven Diskless Kafka.

Join host Hugh Evans for a high-energy hour of rapid-fire conversations with experts shaping the future of streaming data. Broadcasting directly from Current 2025 in New Orleans, this episode packs six lightning interviews into one hour, mixing deep technical insights with a few fun surprises along the way. Guests include Olena Kutsenko (Confluent), Ben Gamble (Ververica), Alex Merced (Dremio), Sion Smith (OSO), Zander Matheson (ex-ByteWax, Confluent), Hojjat Jafarpour (DeltaStream), and Tom Scott (Streambased).

Michael Drogalis, founder of ShadowTraffic and former Confluent stream-processing lead, joins Hugh Evans to tackle one of the hardest problems in Kafka: generating realistic synthetic test data. From his work on Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, and the Onyx platform, Michael shares practical insights for engineering teams struggling with testing and demo data at scale.

Join Hugh Evans on Get KafkaNated as he sits down with Tristan Stevens, VP of Global Customer Success at Redpanda Data and former Cloudera streaming expert. Tristan shares his unique perspective on the evolution of streaming infrastructure, drawing from years of experience leading customer success in both Hadoop ecosystems and next-generation streaming platforms.

Hounded with operational overhead and slow queries? Learn how to fetch data faster and simplify database management with Aiven for PostgreSQL. Aiven’s fully managed PostgreSQL service delivers high performance, automated scaling, and built-in resilience - without the headaches of manual setup and maintenance. Discover how to optimise queries, reduce latency, and stay focused on building your applications instead of managing infrastructure.