Jakub Scholz
Engineer @ Cloudera
Prague, Czechia
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Jakub is a CNCF Ambassador and engineer at Cloudera with deep expertise in Kubernetes, streaming, and messaging. As a co-founder and maintainer of the Strimzi project, he has spent years bridging the gap between Apache Kafka and cloud-native infrastructure. Before his time at Cloudera, Jakub worked at Red Hat and in the financial sector, bringing a wealth of real-world operational experience to the open-source community.
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The Road to Strimzi 1.0
Some projects reach their 1.0 release in a few months. Others need a year or two. And in Strimzi, we needed 8 years. Join us for this talk to celebrate Strimzi 1.0. You will learn what new features this milestone Strimzi release brings, what you need to know before upgrading to it, and what the future of Strimzi looks like beyond 1.0. But we will also look back and do a retrospective of why it took us so long to get the 1.0 release out, and what mistakes we made along the way. So even if you are not a Strimzi user, you might take away some lessons learned from our road to Strimzi 1.0.
The Cost of Apache Kafka
Strimzi makes it easy to run Apache Kafka on Kubernetes. But persistent volumes and high-throughput cross-zone traffic can quietly become major cost drivers. In this talk, we’ll show how you can use OpenCost and NetObserve to build an open source, cost-aware view of our Kafka infrastructure — and how we tuned it to be leaner and smarter. While OpenCost doesn’t track network costs out of the box, we’ll show how to extend it with NetObserve data to estimate cross-zone network costs, attributing them directly to the pods generating the traffic. OpenCost can also help us to monitor compute and storage costs. We’ll share an open-source-driven playbook for cost-effective Apache Kafka on Kubernetes, informed by real-world experience and actionable strategies, without relying on proprietary tools or commercial observability platforms.
Life After Strimzi 1.0.0
Earlier this year, Strimzi celebrated its 1.0.0 release - a major project milestone. After briefly recalling the 1.0.0 release and its main changes, this talk will focus on our roadmap and on where the project is heading next. Gateway API support opens new ways to connect to your Apache Kafka clusters. A new pluggability mechanism inspired by Kubernetes Admission Controllers and policy engines such as Kyverno or Open Policy Agent makes it easier to customize and extend Strimzi. And more flexible security configuration gives you finer control over how your Apache Kafka cluster is secured. Those are just some of the features that are planned or already in progress. We will cover them in this talk and show you how to get involved and help shape them. You will leave this session with a clear picture of the future of Strimzi.
Ask for help like a pro!
Open source communities are like a busy marketplace from some fantasy book. They are crowded, full of magic, and have all kinds of information. You will meet there many different characters: the wizards who saw everything twice and have every answer; the newbies who just landed and are completely lost; or the jumpy folks looking desperately for some quick fix for their production issue. It can be an intimidating place and it can be hard to find the right answers. This talk will try to help you navigate it. What are the differences between commercial support and community help? How do you find the right channel for your questions? What are the things you should always include when asking for help with some problem? How to deal with confidential data in your logs or configurations? This talk will try to answer all these questions and more. It will help you to ask for help like a pro and get the best answers quickly to get your systems up and running as soon as possible.
Stop Restarting Your Pods: Expectation vs. Reality of In-Place CPU and Memory Resizing
Did you know that you can change the CPU and Memory resources assigned to your Pods without restarting them? But is it really a silver bullet to reduce the unnecessary disruptions we all hoped for? Or do the operational challenges outweigh the benefits? This talk will have a look at the in-place resizing of Pod resources from a user’s perspective. It will show how to use this still relatively new Kubernetes feature. But it will also look at the various limitations this feature has, especially related to the type of application being resized. And it will add some practical observations from implementation in the Strimzi project.
Beyond the Install: Take full ownership of your Strimzi cluster
Often, users think that open source is "free" - costing them no money, time, or effort. This talk challenges that mindset. Hitting "kubectl apply" is just the beginning of a long journey toward a reliable, sustainable, and secure production environment. We will explore the critical layers of Strimzi ownership: from securing your container supply chain and mirroring images to handling CVEs in base images and dependencies. Even when there is no official patch release. Join this session to learn how to move beyond basic installation and take full control, responsibility, and ownership over your Strimzi installation.
Build your own social media analytics with Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka is more than just a messaging broker. It has a rich ecosystem of different components. There are connectors for importing and exporting data, different stream processing libraries, schema registries and a lot more. This talk will show how to use it to read data from social networks such as Twitter, process them and use machine learning to analyze them. And all of it will be of course running on top of Kubernetes.
Autoscaling Apache Kafka brokers on Kubernetes with Strimzi
Autoscaling is an important part of modern cloud-native architecture. It allows applications to handle a big load at peak times while helping to optimize costs and make deployments more green and sustainable at the same time. Apache Kafka is well known for its scalability. It can grow with your project from a small cluster up to hundreds of brokers. But it was not very elastic for a long time and using dynamic autoscaling with it was very hard. This talk will guide the attendees through the main challenges of auto-scaling Apache Kafka on Kubernetes. It will show how these challenges can be solved with the help of new features added recently in Strimzi and Apache Kafka projects such as auto-rebalancing, node pools, or tiered storage. And it will help the users get started with the auto-scaling of Apache Kafka.
Elastic Data Streaming: Autoscaling Apache Kafka
Autoscaling is an important part of modern cloud-native architecture. It allows applications to handle a big load at peak times while helping to optimize costs and make deployments more green and sustainable at the same time. Apache Kafka is well known for its scalability. It can grow with your project from a small cluster up to hundreds of brokers. But it was not very elastic for a long time and using dynamic autoscaling with it was very hard. This talk will guide the attendees through the main challenges of auto-scaling Apache Kafka on Kubernetes. It will show how these challenges can be solved with the help of new features added recently in Strimzi and Apache Kafka projects such as auto-rebalancing, node pools, or tiered storage. And it will help the users get started with the auto-scaling of Apache Kafka.
Strimzi: Data Streaming on Kubernetes with Apache Kafka
Strimzi is a CNCF incubating project focusing on running Apache Kafka on Kubernetes. Apache Kafka is a leading date-streaming platform used for building real-time data pipelines. It provides support for high-throughput/low-latency messaging, as well as sophisticated data ingress, egress, and processing capabilities. However, running it on Kubernetes can be complex and tedious. Strimzi makes it simple by providing a set of operators and other tools to make data streaming as simple and Kubernetes-native as possible. This talk will briefly introduce Strimzi, explaining how it works and what it offers. And then it will focus on the current and planned features and their release plans. It will cover the exciting features being worked on - such as ZooKeeper removal, tiered storage, auto-rebalancing, or new certificate management - and deep dive into the most important ones.
Strimzi and the future of Apache Kafka on Kubernetes
Strimzi is a CNCF incubating project focusing on running Apache Kafka on Kubernetes. It provides a set of operators and other tools to make data streaming on Kubernetes as simple as possible. This lightning talk will give a quick introduction to Strimzi and its capabilities. It will also provide an update on the current and planned work - go through the main changes and new features and cover the future plans.
Growing out of StatefulSets
StatefulSets are usually the synonym for running stateful applications on Kubernetes. When you say that you run a database, storage, or messaging system on Kubernetes, people will automatically assume you use them. StatefulSets will manage the Pods for you, give you a stable identity, make it easy to handle persistent storage, and provide other basic building blocks for running stateful applications. But what about their limitations? What if you start outgrowing them? Is that even possible? This talk will share the experience from the Strimzi project of how we started to run into the limitations of what StatefulSets provide and how we eventually decided to leave them behind. But it will also share some of the challenges and pitfalls we faced, troubles we run into, and explain why leaving StatefulSets behind might not be for everyone.
Upgrade yourself to the Business Class
Upgrading your software and keeping it up-to-date is an important part of the software lifecycle. Yet, we see many users using very old versions of Strimzi and Apache Kafka. And often - according to their own words - they use them to run a “critical infrastructure”. This talk will try to explain why staying up to date is important for security reasons but also for example to get help. It will also show that staying up to date is not as hard as many users think by going through the various ways of upgrading Strimzi and demoing some of them.
Released from the cage: Apache Kafka without its ZooKeeper
For years, Apache Kafka relied on Apache ZooKeeper for maintaining its metadata and coordination. But that is coming to an end. After a lot of work in the Apache Kafka community, ZooKeeper is going away from Apache Kafka and it will be replaced with its own Raft-inspired implementation called KRaft. This is a major architecture change for all Kafka users, including those running Kafka on Kubernetes. And it affects also projects such as Strimzi that provide tooling for running Apache Kafka on Kubernetes. So, how does it work? What are the advantages? What does this change mean for the existing ZooKeeper-based Kafka clusters? What are the main challenges and limitations when using Kraft on Kubernetes? What are the changes we had to make in the Strimzi project to make it ready for KRaft? All of this will be answered in this talk including a short demo of what Strimzi support for KRaft looks like.
Make Your Kafka Cluster Production-Ready
Kubernetes became the de-facto standard for running cloud-native applications. And more and more users turn to it also to run stateful applications such as Apache Kafka. While there are different tools such as Helm charts or operators which can get you quickly up and running, there is often still a long way to make sure the Kafka cluster is production-ready. This talk will take you through the main aspects you should consider for your Kafka cluster and will cover things such as resource management, storage, scheduling, rolling updates, or reliability. It will show you how to do it using the Strimzi operator, but the lessons learned will apply also to any other Kafka cluster. If you are interested in production-ready Apache Kafka on Kubernetes, this is a talk for you.
Everything you ever needed to know about Kafka on Kubernetes but were afraid to ask
Kubernetes became the de-facto standard for running cloud-native applications. And many users turn to it also to run stateful applications such as Apache Kafka. You can use different tools to deploy Kafka on Kubernetes - write your own YAML files, use Helm Charts, or go for one of the available operators. But there is one thing all of these have in common. You still need very good knowledge of Kubernetes to make sure your Kafka cluster works properly in all situations. This talk will cover different Kubernetes features such as resources, affinity, tolerations, pod disruption budgets, topology spread constraints and more. And it will explain why they are important for Apache Kafka and how to use them. If you are interested in running Kafka on Kubernetes and do not know all of these, this is a talk for you.
StrimziCon 2026 Sessionize Event
KCD Czech & Slovak 2026 Sessionize Event
Current London 2025 Sessionize Event
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 Sessionize Event
Project Lightning Talk + ContribFest + Maintainer Track: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 Sessionize Event
KCD Czech & Slovak 2024 Sessionize Event
StrimziCon 2024 Sessionize Event
CNCF-hosted Co-located Events Europe 2024 Sessionize Event
CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2023 Sessionize Event
Kafka Summit Europe 2021 Sessionize Event
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