Your Kafka has met compliance requirements? Now SQL needs to step up as well!

When embarking on your Kafka journey, what's your first move?

Commonly, you'll seek the most effective way to visually explore everything happening your the Kafka universe.

Tools like Confluent Cloud, Conduktor, Lenses and AKHQ are excellent for this purpose.

Soon, you'll need more independence in your explorations, you'll want to dump all your data in your favorite database.
Get a database ready, set up Kafka connect, establish a connector to move all your topics, and you're all set.

Satisfaction comes quickly as you return to the world of SQL.
You can rely on your trusty existing ecosystem. In short: you're in a very good place.

But here's the catch: often, the security team enters the picture a bit too late...
... and suddenly, you're in a whirlwind of compliance issues involving GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA etc.

You are now tasked to introduce RBAC, ABAC, data masking, payload encryption, and maybe even crypto shredding in your Kafka security!

Since your target database probably lacks support for some of these features, you find yourself backed into a corner.

Not anymore!

Let me present a practical idea where you'll be able to get your SQL back, while supporting all these security constraints!

(If this approach wins you over, the fresh capabilities it brings to the table will be a pleasant shock.)

6 New Ways to Supercharge Your Kafka Experience

Apache Kafka has revolutionized the way organizations handle real-time data streams. Yet, there's always room for enhancement. In this session, we'll dive into seven innovative strategies that can take your Kafka deployment to the next level. This talk is tailored for Kafka users who are familiar with the basics and are eager to explore advanced features and integrations.

Safeguarding Your Kafka Environment: We'll start by exploring a set of tools that help you fix the most common issues, like bad configuration, misusage, and plain abuse.

Chaos Engineering: Discover how introducing controlled chaos into your Kafka environment can strengthen it.

Encryption: With GDPR, encryption and crypto-shredding need to be a commodity.

SQL Topics: Learn how SQL topics can help your designs.

Claim-Check Pattern: handle large data payloads in Kafka without breaking either your Kafka or your bill.

Multi-Tenancy: Delve into strategies for efficiently managing multiple tenants within a single Kafka cluster, ensuring complete resource isolation.

Each section of this talk will include practical examples, best practices, and real-world applications. Whether you're a Kafka administrator, developer, or data engineer, this session will provide you with a wealth of knowledge and tools to enhance your Kafka experience, making your data streaming processes more secure, efficient, and scalable.

Kafka & GDPR: The Ugly Side of Encryption Nobody Talks About

Encryption sounds like the perfect solution for GDPR compliance in Kafka—until you actually have to implement it. Then reality kicks in: too many keys, too expensive, unusable BI, painful rotations, caching nightmares, performance degradation, backward compatibility headaches, and compression shenanigans.

And the worst part? These problems exist no matter which encryption mechanism you choose!

In this talk, we’ll go beyond the usual “just encrypt it” advice and dive into the real-world problems of managing encryption at scale.

We’ll explore:

Key explosion: How quickly you end up drowning in (costly) keys and what to do about it.
Algorithms: Which one to choose... and Why?
Rotation pain: Why key rotations break things and how to make them safer.
Caching trade-offs: Performance vs. security, and why getting it wrong is a disaster.
Data impact: How encryption affects retention, compaction, and Kafka’s internals.
Backward compatibility hell: Why decrypting old messages isn’t as easy as you think.
Compression nightmares: How encryption wrecks compression, bloats storage, and kills throughput.

This session is for engineers, architects, and decision-makers who want to make encryption work in Kafka—without wrecking performance, reliability, or maintainability.

If you thought encryption was a silver bullet, this talk will show you why it’s just the beginning of the challenge.

Catching Kafka most commons issues

In this talk, where we'll navigate through the most common challenges in Kafka.

We'll not only identify these issues but also bring them to life with demos, present the consequences, and most importantly, we'll provide practical solutions to fix them.

Topic Related Issues
We'll look at frequent errors in setting up Kafka topics, like wrong partition numbers, replication factors and retention policies, and share tips on how to name topics effectively.

Producer Hiccups
Learn key points about sending messages in Kafka, including how to handle acknowledgment settings, compression, and batching.

Consumer Misconfiguration
We'll explore often overlooked Kafka consumer settings, such as 'fetch.min.bytes', different commit strategies and detect rebalance storms

Transactional Misunderstandings
Kafka transactions are powerful but tricky. We'll clear up common misunderstandings and show how to use them correctly.

Data Quality Problems
We'll discuss ensuring the data in your Kafka meets your quality standards and present deserialization error strategies.

This session is perfect for developers and system administrators who already use Kafka but want to make it work better and more reliably across their organization

Observability Made Easy: Unlocking Kafka Client Insights with KIP-714

Kafka is the backbone of modern data streaming architectures, but understanding what’s happening inside your clients has long been a challenge. KIP-714 changes the game by introducing a standardized and extensible way to expose client metrics, making observability accessible to everyone—not just Kafka experts.

In this talk, we’ll explore why KIP-714 is a must-have for non-trivial systems, how it seamlessly integrates with popular observability stacks like OpenTelemetry, and what it means for debugging, performance tuning, and SLA monitoring. With real-world examples and a live demo, you’ll see how easy it is to connect Kafka clients to your telemetry and logging pipelines, unlocking deep insights with minimal effort.

Whether you’re an engineer, SRE, or architect, you’ll walk away with practical knowledge on leveraging KIP-714 to make your Kafka-powered systems more transparent, resilient, and debuggable.

No prior Kafka internals knowledge required—just a desire to see your data streams with clarity!

Kafka: Evolved. Introducing True Queuing with KIP-932

Kafka excels at streaming data, but what happens when you need workers to share a task queue? Traditionally, this meant choosing between complex/costly workarounds or running separate message queue systems alongside Kafka—until now.

KIP-932 introduces native message queuing to Kafka through a simple yet powerful concept called Share Groups. Instead of telling you how it works, we'll show you. Through live demonstrations and clear visualizations, you'll see exactly how multiple workers can pull from the same task pool, how messages are safely distributed without duplication, and what happens when things go wrong.

We'll start with a working demo—watching tasks flow between workers in real-time—then pull back the curtain to show you the protocol mechanics that make it all possible. No mysterious black boxes: you'll see the message leasing, acknowledgments, and recovery processes in action. We'll explore real use cases from order processing to background jobs, and demonstrate how this changes the game for building resilient distributed systems.

Whether you're tired of managing multiple messaging systems, curious about Kafka's evolution, or just want to see some cool distributed systems concepts in action, this talk will give you a clear picture of what's possible.
No deep Kafka internals knowledge required—just bring your curiosity! By the end, the mystery of distributed task queuing will be completely demystified, and you'll understand exactly when and how to use Kafka's newest superpower.

The visual part of my talk about KIP-714 in Current London seemed to be very well received, I want to leverage the same . § https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1OTs-zOAU01CN3XUSoBiBt9SKA25J_DKefhdQdQFObNM (a big part of the talk was a live demo)