Top all-time · #185
Confluent
Company blog · confluent.io/blog · on HN as boredandroiddataprogramming
Confluent is the company blog at confluent.io, writing about data and programming. Since 2014, 248 different Hacker News readers have linked it 531 times, most often “Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza (2015)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 10 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Confluent's blog mainly for Martin Kleppmann's writing, especially 'Turning the Database Inside Out', on logs, stream processing and Kafka, plus some Kafka talks.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Stream, connect, process, and govern your data with a unified Data Streaming Platform built on the heritage of Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink®.
Most-linked posts?
- Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza (2015)25 people · 38 mentions · first linked 2016-11-13
- Exactly-once Semantics: How Kafka Does it12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2017-06-30
- Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2015-08-06
- It’s Okay to Store Data in Apache Kafka (2017)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2017-09-15
- Bottled Water: Real-Time Integration of PostgreSQL and Kafka6 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-03-30
- Publishing with Apache Kafka at The New York Times6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-09-06
- Microservices: Rethinking the Way We Treat Data and Services – Confluent6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-12-13
- /product/ksql/5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-10-09
- Announcing Apache Kafka 0.10 and Confluent Platform 3.04 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-05-24
- Introducing ksqlDB4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-11-20
What Hacker News says?
Confluent absolutely wants a cut for hosted Kafka usage, though, and has made similar changes to Elastic. https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/ > Under the Confluent Community License, you can access the source code and modify or redistribute it; there is only one thing you cannot do, and that is use it to make a competing SaaS offering.
Comment linking /confluent-community-license-faq/
on “AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana”Submitted IBM to acquire Confluent as a story · 449 points
HN discussionI might suggest starting with one thing at a time, pulling in more and more. No one learns it all at once. I might suggest Martin Kleppman's Making Sense of Stream Processing freely available from Confluent [0]. [0] https://www.confluent.io/stream-processing/
Comment linking /stream-processing/
on “CRDTs are the future”Submitted Kafka without ZooKeeper as a story · 393 points
HN discussionMaybe Event Sourcing? - https://www.confluent.io/blog/messaging-single-source-truth/
Comment linking /blog/messaging-single-source-truth/
on “The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018”Submitted Apache Kafka Goes 1.0 as a story · 392 points
HN discussionThe talk on "Turning the database inside-out" [0][1] by the author, Martin Kleppmann, is a fantastic intro to these dynamics, and it's something I'll always recommend to both experienced and inexperienced data modelers and backend developers. It goes pedagogically through the way things are typically done in a relational database in such a clear way that word-for-word it's one of the best tutorials I've seen... but…
Comment linking /blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/
on “Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into”Submitted Publishing with Apache Kafka at The New York Times as a story · 369 points
HN discussionWhoa! somebody actually try to implement the log as the central component of a db! After read https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou... I wondered about that. I think that make the log first class and "plug" relational tables (optionally) will make a amazing database engine. In short, you PERSIST your commands: POST /City .. PUT /City .. DELETE /City .. and put listeners that decide if persist…
Comment linking /blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/
on “Challenging projects every programmer should try”Submitted Kafka Removing Zookeeper Dependency as a story · 314 points
HN discussionPerhaps that’s because some other message brokers are now being touted as databases[0][1], I remember seeing a thread about it on HN couple of days ago. [0] https://www.confluent.io/blog/okay-store-data-apache-kafka/ [1] https://dzone.com/articles/is-apache-kafka-a-database-the-20...
Comment linking /blog/okay-store-data-apache-kafka/
on “Jepsen Disputes MongoDB's Data Consistency Claims”Submitted KSQL: Open Source Streaming SQL for Apache Kafka as a story · 278 points
HN discussionTurning The Database Inside Out: Martin Kleppmann - https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou... in both video and blog form. Describes how to think about any software stack as layers of derived caches on top of immutable event logs, effectively proposing a solution to the first of https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html . It's certainly changed the way I approach software architecture.…
Comment linking /blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/
on “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”Submitted Exactly-once Semantics: How Kafka Does it as a story · 259 points
HN discussionPretty great talk about Kafka at Tesla: https://www.confluent.io/kafka-summit-san-francisco-2019/0-6...
Comment linking /kafka-summit-san-francisco-2019/0-60-teslas-streaming-data-platform
on “Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?”Submitted Apache Kafka, Samza, and the Unix Philosophy of Distributed Data as a story · 174 points
HN discussionM U INC | Senior Data Engineer (aka "Director of I/O Bound Stuff") | Austin, TX | ONSITE | Full Time We are a small independent startup (fully funded by our MVP's proceeds) focused on managing, enriching and presenting large and complex Energy Data. Our technical capabilities translate DIRECTLY into commercial success, we are thus obsessed with coupling Engineering Excellence with Pragmatism. We strive to continuous…
Comment linking /blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2018)”Submitted Apache Kafka 0.9 is released as a story · 163 points
HN discussionHere's a quite compelling manifesto from Martin Kleppmann: https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou... https://www.confluent.io/blog/apache-kafka-samza-and-the-uni... Some very interesting architectural ideas in there. In particular, the observation that if you turn off history pruning in Kafka, you have a consistent distributed log, which can then be piped off into whatever services need to cons…
Comment linking /blog/apache-kafka-samza-and-the-unix-philosophy-of-distributed-data/
on “Don't use Hadoop when your data isn't that big (2013)”Submitted Noise Mapping with KSQL, a Raspberry Pi and a Software-Defined Radio as a story · 115 points
HN discussionThis is the best explanation I've found about Kafka and Samza: https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou...
Comment linking /blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/
on “Don't use Hadoop when your data isn't that big (2013)”Submitted Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza (2015) as a story · 112 points
HN discussionWhy does everyone seem to think Kafka is a queue replacement; it's a high performance immutable log with a guaranteed CAP profile and the possibility to add materised views to the log. See here for details: https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou...
Comment linking /blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/
on “Don't use Hadoop when your data isn't that big (2013)”Submitted It’s Okay to Store Data in Apache Kafka (2017) as a story · 84 points
HN discussionSo, I've been having a back and forth with a colleague on this and I'm genuinely interested in why you so strongly suggest this. For the record, I have good real world experience with all kinds of databases (relational, NoSQL, and even legacy multivalue and hierarchical ones), and I don't see why what you say has to be "always true". One way of looking at Kafka is that is an unbundled transaction log, nothing more o…
Comment linking /blog/okay-store-data-apache-kafka/
on “What every software engineer should know about Apache Kafka”Submitted Distributed consensus reloaded: ZooKeeper and replication in Kafka as a story · 82 points
HN discussionM U INC | Senior Data Engineer (aka "Director of I/O Bound Stuff") | Austin, TX | ONSITE | Full Time | 100K-130K + EQUITY We are a small independent startup (fully funded by our MVP's proceeds) focused on managing, enriching and presenting large and complex energy data. Our technical capabilities translate DIRECTLY into commercial success, we are thus obsessed with coupling Engineering Excellence with Pragmatism. We…
Comment linking /blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2018)”Submitted Bottled Water – Real-Time Integration of PostgreSQL and Kafka as a story · 73 points
HN discussionM U INC | Senior Data Engineer (aka "Director of I/O Bound Stuff") | Rust / Kafka | Austin, TX | ONSITE | Full Time | 100K-130K w/ EQUITY We are a small independent startup (fully funded by our MVP's proceeds) focused on managing, enriching and presenting large and complex Energy Data. Our technical capabilities translate DIRECTLY into commercial success, we are thus obsessed with coupling Engineering Excellence wit…
Comment linking /blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)”Submitted How ksqlDB Works: Internal Architecture and Advanced Features as a story · 71 points
HN discussion
