Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

What 16,808 Kafka Clusters Tell Us About Data Streaming

Half a year ago, we launched a free tier cloud Kafka. We have 16,808 clusters so we got curious: what are these builders telling us about the state of Apache Kafka? The headlines this quarter suggest Kafka is dying because the streaming market is consolidating. At Aiven we see the opposite. Kafka is not shrinking. It is spreading outward from enterprise platform teams into the hands of individual builders. We are now seeing >200 new Kafka clusters created per day on the free tier.

Fixing JavaScript observability, one library at a time

Over the past few weeks, we have been driving a cross-ecosystem effort to replace the “monkey-patching” that powers all JavaScript APM tools today with something built into the runtime. Here is why, how, and where it stands. This applies to server-side JavaScript only (Node.js, Bun, Deno, Cloudflare Workers). Browsers do not have diagnostics_channel and lack the async context propagation primitives needed to polyfill it.

When an incident hits, who stays in the loop?

Your IT team gets alerted - but stakeholders? They’re left checking status pages or chasing updates. There’s a better way. With SIGNL4 Active Stakeholder Communication, everyone stays informed automatically — without adding extra work for your team. Send real-time updates instantly via push notifications Create stakeholder groups for different scenarios Track exactly who was notified — and when.

ActiveMQ Monitoring & Alerting Setup: The Complete 2026 Guide

Most ActiveMQ outages are not sudden failures. They are visible in the metrics for minutes, sometimes hours, before they become incidents. A memory usage graph climbing past 60%. A queue depth that isn't draining. An enqueue time that doubled after a deployment. A consumer count that dropped from 3 to 1 at 2 AM.

Observability and Security for the AI Era

Datadog has always been driven by a broader vision of helping teams understand and operate complex systems. In this session, you’ll hear from Michael Whetten, Product SVP, and Abrar Hussain, Senior Director, Product Management, as they share the latest updates across the Datadog product suite and discuss how that vision continues to shape the platform’s evolution and support the next generation of AI-driven applications.

How to Ship AI-Generated Code to Production

AI writes code. But shipping to production? That still takes a software engineer. In this GitKon talk, Chris Kelly from Augment Code breaks down what it actually means to use AI-assisted development to write production-ready code, not vibe code. If you've been using AI coding assistants and wondering why the output doesn't always make it past code review, this is for you. Chris covers: Key takeaway: The engineers who will thrive aren't the ones who let AI do everything. They're the ones who know how to review, direct, and architect around what AI produces.

Building a dev platform like a product: Inside The New York Times with Sneha Rao and Ahmed Bebars

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Sneha Rao, VP of Product, and Ahmed Bebars, Principal Engineer, both from The New York Times Developer Platforms team, to discuss what it means to build and operate a developer platform at scale across a complex media organization.

How to Improve Your Documentation with AI (CircleCI Chunk Tutorial)

AI coding assistants help you ship features fast, but documentation almost never keeps up. In this Ship Smarter session, we'll show you how CircleCI's Chunk autonomous CI/CD agent automatically analyzes your codebase, identifies documentation gaps, and opens a pull request with improvements. No manual writing required. In this video.