IN PERSON! Apache Kafka® Meetup (Apr 2026)Hello everyone! Join us for an Apache Kafka® x Apache Flink® meetup on **Apr 9th from 5:30pm**, in Melbourne!
The address, agenda, and speaker information can be found below. See you there!
**📍Venue**:
394 High Street Northcote, Victoria 3070
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**🗓 Agenda:**
* 5:30pm: Doors open
* 5:30pm - 6:00pm: Pizza, Drinks, and Networking
* 6:00pm - 6:30pm: Chad Harris, Solutions Architect, Factor House
* 6:30pm - 7:00pm: Stephen Ermann, Senior Customer Success Technical Architect
* 7:00pm - 7:30pm: Additional Networking
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**💡 Speaker:**
Chad Harris, Solutions Architect, Factor House
**Talk:**
Things that go bump in the night: Kafka Operational Issues and How to Survive Them
**Abstract:**
Most Kafka talks focus on how things should work—this one is about what actually happens in production.
We’ll walk through real-world operational issues encountered with Apache Kafka and its clients, from subtle misconfigurations to full “why is everything on fire?” moments. Along the way, we’ll break down how to identify what’s going wrong, which signals actually matter, and how to approach debugging when the system doesn’t behave the way you expect.
This talk will also touch on observability, common failure patterns, and practical mitigation strategies you can apply immediately. Expect a mix of technical deep dives, debugging workflows, and a few war stories (including some questionable decisions and log-staring sessions). If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s just you? It's not!
**Bio:**
Chad Harris is a streaming data specialist and Solutions Architect at Factor House, where he helps organisations design, scale, and operate Apache Kafka platforms using industry-leading tooling.
With experience scaling Kafka across organisations ranging from small startups to some of Silicon Valley's largest companies, Chad has been working with Kafka since its early days. He brings deep expertise across both real-time streaming and data-at-rest systems, with a strong focus on practical, production-ready architectures.
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**💡 Speaker:**
Stephen Ermann, Senior Customer Success Technical Architect
**Talk:**
From Lag to Smooth Sailing: How Queues for Kafka (KIP-932) Fix Slow Consumers
**Abstract:**
Slow or bursty consumers are one of the most common reasons Kafka applications end up fighting lag, over-provisioning, and operational fire drills. Traditional Kafka consumer groups work brilliantly for high-throughput stream processing, but they can make it hard to serve heterogeneous consumers, apply backpressure cleanly, or guarantee fair access when some consumers fall behind.
In this talk, we’ll explore **Queues for Kafka**, the new KIP-932 feature that introduces native queue semantics on top of Kafka’s battle-tested log foundation. We’ll look at how queues decouple producer and consumer throughput, isolate slow consumers without penalising fast ones, and provide more predictable delivery and scaling behaviour for “task” and “work queue” style workloads.
You’ll walk away with:
* A clear mental model of how Kafka queues differ from topics and consumer groups
* Concrete design patterns for handling slow and spiky consumers
* Migration tips for evolving existing Kafka-based services to use queues safely
If you’ve ever stared at a lag graph wondering whether to add more consumers, more partitions, or more coffee, this session will show you a cleaner path to smooth sailing with Kafka.
**Bio:**
Stephen Ermann is a **Senior Customer Success Technical Architect at Confluent**, working with leading financial institutions across APAC to design and operate mission-critical, real-time data platforms. With deep experience in **Apache Kafka**, **Confluent Cloud and Platform**, and surrounding ecosystems like **Kafka Connect** and **Apache Flink**, Stephen helps customers solve hard problems around scalability, reliability, and security in production. They are particularly focused on **RBAC, OAuth, mTLS, and container image security**, as well as emerging **agentic AI** patterns built on streaming data. Outside day-to-day architecture work, Stephen regularly shares practical patterns and lessons learned at meetups and user groups across the region.
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If you would like to speak or host our next event please let us know! community@[confluent.io](http://confluent.io/)