Confluent Blog

When building API-driven web applications, there is one key metric that engineering teams should minimize: the blocked factor. The blocked factor measures how much time developers spend in the following

Traditional relational database systems are ubiquitous in software systems. They are surrounded by a strong ecosystem of tools, such as object-relational mappers and schema migration helpers. Relational databases also provide

One of the football (as per European terminology) highlights of the summer is the FIFA Women’s World Cup. France, Brazil, and the USA are the favourites, and this year Italy

When you build microservices architectures, one of the concerns you need to address is that of communication between the microservices. At first, you may think to use REST APIs—most programming

Every developer who uses Apache Kafka® has used a Kafka consumer at least once. Although it is the simplest way to subscribe to and access events from Kafka, behind the

With the release of Apache Kafka® 2.1.0, Kafka Streams introduced the processor topology optimization framework at the Kafka Streams DSL layer. This framework opens the door for various optimization techniques

Apache Kafka® based applications stand out for their ability to decouple producers and consumers using an event log as an intermediate layer. One result of this is that producers and

When should you use an API? When should you use an event? Most contemporary software architectures are some mix of these two approaches. I will attempt to articulate in layman’s