Apache Kafka: What it is and where it’s going.

This was an update to the team's first public lightboard, which was until that time the most-viewed video they'd released. Published in various forms in 2019 and 2020, explained Apache Kafka to over a million viewers in its combined releases. By 2025, the Kafka ecosystem had evolved, and Confluent's perspective had evolved with it. These days, it's less important to talk about event-driven microservices, and more important to emphasize Kafka as the foundation of a platform including data governance (Schema Registry), stream processing (Apache Flink), and integration (Kafka Connect). This lightboard introduced a new generation of developers to Kafka with a more modern perspective in mind.