Field notes from running Kafka in production.
September 11, 2026 · MessagePilots
Snapshots that stall, replication slots that fill a disk, tombstones that vanish under the wrong cleanup policy. The change-data-capture decisions worth making before the connector goes to production.
Read moreSeptember 10, 2026
Tiered storage (KIP-405) moves closed log segments to object storage and shrinks broker disks. What it changes about retention, rebalancing, and read latency — and the topics it still will not accept.
Read moreAugust 10, 2026
EOS delivers exactly-once processing inside a Kafka-to-Kafka pipeline — not exactly-once side effects. Where transactions earn their latency cost, and where an idempotent sink is the better buy.
Read moreJuly 13, 2026
Partition count caps your parallelism and is painful to change on a keyed topic. A worksheet method: measure per-partition throughput, size for peak plus replay headroom, check key skew.
Read moreJune 16, 2026
Compatibility modes decide your deploy order, transitive checks protect you from old data, and the rest is a short list of rules a CI gate can enforce. How to change schemas without incidents.
Read more