What role do human operators play in an increasingly automated world? How can mere mortals oversee—and make sense of—what large scale real-time systems are doing right now? Is it possible to get an intuitive high level sense of the real-time state of a hundred million things? Is it useful to do so? Can users explore real-time data with the same specificity they’re accustomed to having for events past?

In this lightning talk, we’ll demonstrate real-world attempts at answering the above questions using full stack, end-to-end streaming data applications, fed by Kafka. We’ll show live demos with interactive, truly real-time browser-based visualization of millions of real-world entities, and their actionable rollups.

Full stack streaming applications that push data all the way through to end-users, with comprehensive application logic in the real-time loop, take Kafka topics to the next level. We’ll share lessons learned—and mistakes to avoid—gleaned from a decade’s experience striving to make cross-domain streaming data accessible to people, so that they may feel more comfortable with—and better in charge of—the global automations they most wish to pursue.