Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this episode, we sit down with Viktor Somogyi-Vass, a veteran of the Kafka ecosystem who recently joined Aiven after nearly a decade at Cloudera. Viktor shares his journey from becoming an Apache Kafka Committer to tackling the most complex challenges in modern cloud-native streaming. We dive deep into the architectural shift from traditional data centers to the cloud, exploring how Diskless Kafka (Disaggregated Storage) is slashing costs and why KIP-1134 is the next frontier for true multi-tenancy.

Viktor Kessler is both co-founder of Vakamo, a company specialising in governance for Iceberg, and a major contributor to Lakekeeper, an open-source Iceberg REST catalog. His contributions to the Iceberg aren’t limited to pull requests: Viktor is also the organiser of the Apache Iceberg Meetup Europe and hosted some fantastic events in 2025 that brought the Iceberg community together all over Europe from Dublin to Vilnius.

Join us for A Kristmas Kafka, an informal and deeply technical roundtable with Apache Kafka committers, contributors and community leaders. This conversation brings together the people closest to the Kafka codebase to reflect on where the project started, how it has evolved and what lies ahead for streaming systems.

Message brokers are a critical component of modern distributed systems, facilitating asynchronous communication between services. Load testing message broker integrations requires special considerations since the interaction patterns differ from traditional HTTP-based APIs. Speedscale provides specialized tooling to help you load test applications that integrate with message brokers by.

Zander Matheson, Staff Product Manager at Confluent, chats with Hugh at Confluent Current about Kafka war stories.