Three Plus Some Lovely Kafka Trends

A Kafka Summit program committee member shares observed trends from reviewing hundreds of session abstracts. Three major themes emerge: a rapid expansion of Kafka connectors (including CDC tools like Debezium, exactly-once support via KIP-618), democratization of data pipelines through self-service Kafka environments with portals for managing access, schemas, and compliance, and growing adoption of stream processing using Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, and ksqlDB. Honorable mentions include Kafka testing tooling, ML/AI data feeding via Kafka, and GraphQL push updates from Kafka topics.