It’s the first work-from-home episode of Ask Confluent, where Gwen Shapira (Core Kafka Engineering Leader, Confluent) virtually sits down with Apache Kafka® expert Anna McDonald (Staff Technical Account Manager, Confluent) to answer questions from Twitter. 

Find out Anna’s favorite Kafka Improvement Proposal (KIP), which  will start to use racially neutral terms in the Kafka community and in our code base, as well as answers to the following questions: 

• If you could pick any one KIP from the backlog that hasn't yet been implemented and have it immediately available, which one would you pick?
• Are we able to arrive at any formula for identifying the consumer/producer throughput rate in Kafka with the given hardware specifications (CPU, RAM, network, and disk)? 
• Does incremental cooperative rebalancing also work for general Kafka consumers in addition to Kafka Connect rebalancing?

They also answer how to determine throughput and achieve your desired SLA by using partitions. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Watch Ask Confluent #18: The Toughest Questions ft. Anna McDonald
• From Eager to Smarter in Apache Kafka Consumer Rebalances
• Streaming Heterogeneous Databases with Kafka Connect – The Easy Way
• Keynote: Tim Berglund, Confluent | Closing Keynote Presentation | Kafka Summit 2020
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)