Get Kafka-Nated S2E5: Nobody Understands Kafka Costs

In this episode of Get Kafka-Nated, host Hugh Evans is joined by Stanislav Kozlovski, Apache Kafka committer, independent consultant, and author of 2 Minute Streaming — a newsletter with over 7,000 subscribers. After six years at Confluent, including time on the Kafka Serverless team, Stan went independent and has been writing and consulting full-time. He's one of the most recognised voices in the Kafka community, with over 50k followers across social media.
In this session we go somewhere the streaming industry rarely goes honestly: Kafka costs. From calculator assumptions to networking blind spots to the structural incentive problems baked into SaaS pricing, we're pulling it all apart.
We'll cover:

Why Kafka pricing is genuinely hard, not just annoying maths
How vendor cost calculators are built — and who they're built for
The compression gotcha that quietly inflates your bill
Networking as the most consistently unmodelled cost
What honest due diligence on a Kafka platform actually looks like

Hosted by Hugh as part of the Get Kafka-Nated series.
📅 May 18th
🕓 4pm GMT
🎤 Live