Speaker

Abhishek Walia

Abhishek Walia

Stream data, observe the path, develop chargeback mastery like fine art

San Jose, California, United States

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I am an Architect with over 16 years of experience in designing and delivering scalable, efficient and customer centric solutions. Currently, I spend most of my days working with Fortune 500 customers tailor their streaming ecosystems to solve their problems elegantly. My job entails helping them see the corner cases that they might run into, architect their data streaming systems for scale and resiliency, engrain observability as a must before production go-live and lately evangelize how to be mindful about costs with the ecosystem. Before Confluent, I architected large scale streaming solutions - think real time fraud detection, CDC at scale, geo-replication etc for big corporations and multi-nationals.

When I am off the clock, I’m generally out chasing golden-hour shots where I can. Nothing clears your head like a sunset over a beach overlooking the golden haze and surreal sunsets in San Francisco.

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • Kafka
  • Kafka Connect
  • Apache Kafka
  • Leadership from the Middle
  • Real-Time Processing with Kafka
  • Event Driven Architecture
  • Cloud & Infrastructure
  • Creative Problem Solving

From “Where’s My Money?” to “Here’s Your Bill”: Demystifying Kafka Chargebacks and Showbacks

Have you ever wondered how the money you spent on those kafka clusters is being utilized? Or how much end users should be paying for those awesome use cases that they run in production at scale without worrying about downtime and resiliency? How do you charge that one person who requested those 1000 partition topics, or the one who has like 3 out of 1200 topics but is using about 70% of the available network throughput for your cluster. If you ever wondered about any of these questions, this talk is for you.

In this talk, we will deep dive into ways to dissect your Kafka bills and attribute them to your end users, your business teams, your application teams that depend on these Kafka clusters. I will help you understand the fundamentals of how to approach chargebacks/showbacks for Kafka and show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Using open source tooling and an example, we’ll discuss:

* Techniques to define a core identity – an mTLS certificate or a SASL user or a Business unit? Which one is it and which one should it be?
* How to envision cost split – Should it be spread evenly or should there be a usage based differentiation for things like network over-utilization? Noisy neighbour anyone?
* Chargeback – What should be the final output product of your process and how should it be delivered? Is an excel sheet enough or do you want a dashboard that keeps updating itself automagically?

By the end of this talk, you will be able to understand the fundamentals to help you either build out your own cost analysis for Kafka or use the tool to just say - “Here’s your Bill”.

Current New Orleans 2025 Sessionize Event

October 2025 New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

Abhishek Walia

Stream data, observe the path, develop chargeback mastery like fine art

San Jose, California, United States

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