Tales from the Frontline of Apache Kafka DevOps ft. Jason Bell

Jason Bell (Apache Kafka® DevOps Engineer, digitalis.io, and Author of “Machine Learning: Hands-On for Developers and Technical Professionals” ) delves into his 32-year journey as a DevOps engineer and how he discovered Apache Kafka. He began his voyage in hardware technology before switching over to software development. From there, he got involved in event streaming in the early 2000s where his love for Kafka started. His first Kafka project involved monitoring Kafka clusters for flight search data, and he's been making magic ever since!

Jason first learned about the power of the event streaming during Michael Noll’s talk on the streaming API in 2015. It turned out that Michael had written off 80% of Jason’s streaming API jobs with a single talk. 

As a Kafka DevOps engineer today, Jason works with on-prem clusters and faces challenges like instant replicas going down and bringing other developers who are new to Kafka up to speed so that they can eventually adopt it and begin building out APIs for Kafka. He shares some tips that have helped him overcome these challenges and bring success to the team.

EPISODE LINKS

• Machine Learning: Hands-On for Developers and Technical Professionals by Jason Bell 
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

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