“Kafka is powerful—but it’s also a trap for the unprepared.”
From the outside, Kafka looks like just another message queue. But under the hood? It's a minefield of subtle misconfigurations, scaling headaches, and mysterious consumer lag. Ask our Kafka Helpdesk—we've seen it all.
Typical cries for help:

--> “We need to clean up unused Kafka topics after a merge request... how do we find them safely?”

--> “Authentication works, but our consumer group still can't read from the topic.”

--> “A single malformed message in PROD is crashing our jobs!”

In this session, We’ll take you on a journey through the most common Kafka anti-patterns—things that look fine until your cluster goes sideways. I’ll also show you the patterns, tools, and AWS-native solutions that have helped us tame large-scale Kafka deployments.
You’ll leave with:
--> Real-world Kafka horror stories—and how to avoid them

--> Production-proven design patterns (think schema registries, tiered storage, ACL strategies, observability)

--> Tips to cut operational cost and reduce cognitive overhead

--> A blueprint for keeping your Kafka stack lean, secure, and future-proof

Whether you’re a developer, DevOps engineer, or architect, this talk will help you avoid the traps—and sleep better at night knowing your Kafka setup won’t wake you at 3AM.

Why? Because our Kafka Helpdesk is TIRED!!

Length: 30 or 45 minutes, incl. Q&A

Level:
Intermediate

Tags:
Kafka, Apache Kafka, Amazon MSK, Event-Driven Architecture, DevOps, Observability, Cost Optimization, Cloud-Native, Streaming, Architecture