This year, Confluent turns six! In honor of this milestone, we are taking a very special moment to celebrate with Gwen Shapira by highlighting the top six things everyone should know about Apache Kafka®:

1. Clients have metrics
2. Bug fix releases/Kafka Improvement Proposals (KIPs)
3. Idempotent producers and how they work
4. Kafka Connect is part of Kafka and Single Message Transforms (SMTs) are worth not missing out on
5. Cooperative rebalancing 
6. Generating sequence numbers and how Kafka changes the way you think

Listen as Tim and Gwen talk through the importance of Kafka Connect, cooperative rebalancing protocols, and the promise (and warning) that your data architecture will never be the same. As Gwen puts it, “Kafka gives you the options, but it's up to you how you use it.”

EPISODE LINKS

• KIP-415: Incremental Cooperative Rebalancing in Kafka Connect
• Why Kafka Connect? ft. Robin Moffatt 
• Confluent Hub 
• Creativity Inc
• Fifth Discipline 
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)