Axual at the Kafka Summit London 2023 – feedback from the Kafka community

Axual attended the Kafka Summit in London as sponsors of the event in person for the first time. I had visited the Kafka Summit before of course, and we were also sponsor of the virtual Kafka Summit during the Covid pandemic. Being so close to the launch of our new Axual Governance solution we were curious about the reception, and of course see what else is going on in the Kafka world.

Self-service and governance for Kafka

Well, the reception of our Axual Governance and our approach to governance was overwhelmingly positive. The new Self Service UI was praised for the design and styling in general. The topology overview, topic and application views received praise for providing proper insights as an event catalog and administrative tooling.

But also our view on Governance, data ownership and application ownership that is aligned with the responsibilities of persons, teams or departments inside your organization was well received by not only the product/platform owners, architects and other non-developers, but also by a lot of the developers that visited our stand.

Which was a surprise for me, as most Kafka solutions are developer oriented, putting the development teams in the driver’s seat for Kafka. It turns out that if you provide the proper tooling like our Terraform provider, they understand perfectly that the business wants to remain in control of the topics, schemas and access management.

The way Axual products allows platform operators, application developers and topic and data owners to focus on their own responsibilities without slowing each other down was well received too.

The Kafka ecosystem has matured

Getting back to the Summit, there were a lot of interesting things there.

It was very good to see how much the Kafka ecosystem has matured. The sponsors ranged from Kafka as a Service and Kafka Platform providers to companies specialized in Kafka development and integration, from API and integration tooling to alternative streaming platforms.

It is also clear that most of the companies are focused on their own segment and try to work well with other toolsets and allow the customer to select which toolset best fits their requirements and to keep the Kafka ecosystem flexible.

And then there were the breakout sessions and lightning talks, also ranging from event streaming architecture challenges to sessions explaining technical solutions to development and deployment problems.

As usual, the Kafka Summit offered a lot of value for everyone involved with event streaming.

From a sponsor point of view the Kafka Summit allowed us to present ourselves to all members of the streaming world, not just developers, but data engineers, platform and product owners and CTOs as well.

How to get started?

Talked to us at the Kafka Summit or did you got excited from reading this post? Here are a couple of next steps you could take:

– Start a free trial

– Request a demo and talk to our experts

– View other content and customer case studies