News
What's new in Kafka" 4. 1. 0? Introducing the new Streams Rebalance Protocol
2+ hour, 52+ min ago (668+ words) April 20, 2026 | By Paul Brebner It's been a while since I've looked at new Apache Kafka versions and features (Kafka 4. 0. 0 back in July/August 2025, just after we released 4. 0 as GA on our managed platform). There were lots of new additions in…...
Understanding Open Search" vector field types'Part 1: knn_vector
6+ day, 2+ hour ago (686+ words) April 14, 2026 | By Ramya Ravi knn_vector enables developers to store machine learning embeddings and perform similarity search based on meaning rather than exact words, laying the groundwork for scalable semantic search. This is a developer-focused two-part series. Part 1 covers Open Search's knn_vector field…...
Open Search version 3. 6 release'smart agents and fast search
1+ week, 3+ day ago (925+ words) April 10, 2026 | By Kassian Wren ML Commons is the main driver for using LLMs and other ML models within Open Search clusters. The improvements made within are important for Open Search's continued development as an AI search platform. One of the…...
How to build a streaming analytics pipeline with Terraform and Instaclustr'Part 2: Designing the complete data pipeline
1+ week, 5+ day ago (912+ words) April 08, 2026 | By Walt Ribeiro In part 1, we deployed a managed Apache Kafka cluster with Terraform. That gave us a reliable message broker, but a broker sitting alone isn't a pipeline'it's just infrastructure waiting for a purpose. Today, we add the…...
How to build a streaming analytics pipeline with Terraform and Instaclustr'Part 1: Setting up your first Kafka" cluster
1+ week, 5+ day ago (789+ words) April 08, 2026 | By Walt Ribeiro Every year, teams spend countless hours clicking through cloud consoles, manually provisioning infrastructure, and hoping they remember the exact configuration when it's time to rebuild. Then something breaks at 2 a. m. and nobody remembers which checkbox was checked…...
Apache Cassandra" 5. 0: Improving performance with Unified Compaction Strategy
2+ mon, 1+ day ago (741+ words) February 18, 2026 | By Mariah Mc Laughlin In the past, operators had to choose between rigid strategies and accept significant trade-offs. UCS changes this paradigm, allowing the system to efficiently adapt to changing workloads with tuneable configurations that can be altered mid-flight…...
Under the hood: Engineering faster Click House" performance
2+ mon, 1+ week ago (1236+ words) February 11, 2026 | By Guang Zhao Speed matters in data analytics. When you are processing billions of rows, even small performance improvements compound into massive time and cost savings. For Click House 25. 10, I contributed three patches that push the boundaries of query…...
Exploring the key features of Cassandra" 5. 0
3+ mon, 6+ day ago (263+ words) January 14, 2026 | By Mariah Mc Laughlin Additional enhancements include expanded mathematical CQL functions, dynamic data masking, and experimental support for Java 17. At Net App, Apache Cassandra 5. 0 is fully supported, and we are actively assisting customers as they transition from 4. x. SAI supports…...
Freezing streaming data into Apache Iceberg'Part 1: Using Apache Kafka'Connect Iceberg Sink Connector
4+ mon, 4+ day ago (502+ words) December 16, 2025 | By Paul Brebner And then there's "zero-copy" approaches'these rely on the well-known computer science trick of sharing a single copy of data using references (or pointers), rather than duplicating the data. This idea has been around for almost as…...
Freezing streaming data into Apache Iceberg'Part 2: Using Iceberg Topics
4+ mon, 4+ day ago (1135+ words) December 16, 2025 | By Paul Brebner For a blog series that started out being about Kafka and Iceberg, why are we suddenly interested in Kafka Tiered Storage?" Well, icebergs are just "tiered" floating ice. The visible tip (typically only 10%) is called the…...