iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Almog @almog.xyz · 09/12/2025

The inner join between sets of people who build databases, write, and draw? Low cardinality. I'm in that set, so I'm starting a blog! Here's my first post: www.bitsxpages.com/p/frameworks...

bitsxpages.com

frameworks for understanding databases

building mental models for tradeoffs in performance, availability and durability in data systems

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 10/09/2025

Correct. The new site is a temporary one, more details will follow as we firm up our new plans.

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Chris @chris.blue · 22/04/2025

Today marks SlateDB’s one year anniversary! It’s been a lot of fun. Thanks to @rohanpd.bsky.social @flaneur2024.bsky.social @almog.ai @vigneshc.bsky.social @paulbutler.org Jason Gustafson, David Moravek, and many others for joining the project. 😀

slatedb.io

SlateDB - An embedded storage engine built on object storage | SlateDB

Description will go into a meta tag in <head />

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 16/04/2025

That looks super interesting. There seems to be a burst of innovation in this space of better developer abstractions on top of data systems recently.

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Chris @chris.blue · 31/03/2025

I’m a sucker for a good cost calculator. This one is pretty slick. Lots of components contribute to cost in Kafka Streams.

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Chris @chris.blue · 17/03/2025

SlateDB 0.5.0 is out! Features: - Checkpoints - Clones - Read only client - Split/merge database foundation - TTL filtering on reads - Last version with breaking byte format changes By the numbers: - 62 commits - 2 new contributors - 10 total contributors github.com/slatedb/slat...

github.com

Release v0.5.0 · slatedb/slatedb

What's Changed Refactor Block Tests to Use Table-Driven Test Cases by @samsond in #410 Update await calls in README.md by @criccomini in #425 chore: Apply table driven test for sst.rs by @jeffreyl...

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Luke @lukehedger.dev · 16/03/2025

Related: super interesting discussion on stateful stream processing vs OLTP with @apurvamehta.com from @responsive.dev open.spotify.com/episode/1hsH... (start at 18:46)

open.spotify.com

Reinventing Stream Processing: From LinkedIn to Responsive with Apurva Mehta

Tech on the Rocks · Episode

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Kostas Pardalis @cpard.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

I'm always excited to chat with @apurvamehta.com about what @responsive.dev is building. Streaming and real time as terms are being constantly reinvented as the market needs change rapidly, and Apurva is one of the best to talk about that. Check the conversation here: techontherocks.show/15

techontherocks.show

Tech on the Rocks | Reinventing Stream Processing: From LinkedIn to Responsive with Apurva Mehta

SummaryIn this episode, Apurva Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Responsive, recounts his extensive journey in stream processing—from his early work at LinkedIn and Confluent to his current venture at R...

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 07/03/2025

If, on the other hand, IDEs can build proprietary adjacent tooling that integrates into developer workflows, they may become the integration point, and consequently an aggregator.

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 07/03/2025

Not sure what you mean by aggregator, but for me it's something that has a 2-sided network effect. I don't know if that applies to the IDEs: If 2 IDEs use the same foundation model, what's the structural barrier for one to copy the other over the medium term?

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Chris @chris.blue · 06/03/2025

I’m excited to listen to this one. Some of my favorite folks all in one podcast 😀

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 06/03/2025

This week, our 101 series has @ableegoldman.bsky.social diving deep into the world of performance optimization for Kafka Streams. This isn't just theory: she shows how we realized 10x throughput improvements by implementing these techniques in prod! www.responsive.dev/blog/perform...

responsive.dev

Kafka Streams 101: Optimizing your apps for maximum performance

Learn the concepts, configs, and application design strategies to get your Kafka Streams apps running as optimally as possible.

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Tech on the Rocks @totrrocks.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

New episode: Reinventing Stream Processing with @apurvamehta.com from @responsive.dev We cover: Real-time vs low latency in streaming Why stateful streaming is hard at scale RocksDB, Postgres limitations SQL vs flexible APIs Decoupling state & compute with SlateDB. 🎧 👉

techontherocks.show

Tech on the Rocks

Join Kostas and Nitay as they speak with amazingly smart people who are building the next generation of technology, from hardware to cloud compute. Tech on the Rocks is for people who are curious…

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Sophie Blee-Goldman @ableegoldman.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Next entry in the Kafka Streams 101 series: application lifecycle. Very beginner friendly, but even the pros might find a useful tip or two -- for example: have you heard of the new standby task listener? Check it out: www.responsive.dev/blog/app-lif...

responsive.dev

Kafka Streams 101: Application Lifecycle

Learn how to properly start, stop, and manage the lifecycle of Kafka Streams

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Sophie Blee-Goldman @ableegoldman.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

We're keeping the ball rolling on the Kafka Streams 101 series with yet another blog post! This time the focus is on configuration, and breaking down the most important configs to focus on for various needs (such as correctness, resiliency, etc) Check it out here: www.responsive.dev/blog/importa...

responsive.dev

Kafka Streams 101: The Most Important Configs

Learn which configurations are most critical for a reliable and efficient deployment

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Responsive @responsive.dev · 14/02/2025

We are happy to announce that we have completed another SOC2 Type 2 audit along with completing another successful penetration test against our cloud services. You can find the latest reports on our trust center: trust.responsive.dev

trust.responsive.dev

Responsive Trust Center

Responsive is a stream processing solution that brings disaggregated state, autoscaling, observability and enterprise-grade support to Kafka Streams. Eliminate unpredictable lag and rebalance instabil...

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 13/02/2025

wow. that's so cool. I never thought to use ChatGPT like that. It makes so much sense!

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 13/02/2025

What’s a query example that ChatGPT helped with?

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 13/02/2025

Most banks export your credit card transactions as CSV, with categorizations. I just load that into sheets and then make a chart out of it. Since most of the spending is on CC, it works pretty well.

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 13/02/2025

(3/3) Application upgrades were by far the #1 requested topic when we asked what the community would like to learn about earlier this year. We hope you find this latest post in our Kafka Streams 101 series helpful! www.responsive.dev/blog/topolog...

responsive.dev

Kafka Streams 101: Topology Upgrades

A Kafka Streams 101 lesson to learn how to identify unsafe changes to a topology and the techniques to mitigate them

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 13/02/2025

(2/3) @ableegoldman.bsky.social has been helping the @kafkastreams.bsky.social community with application upgrades since what feels like the beginning of time. She has now put all of that practical knowledge in one blog post to help everyone reason about their upgrades and do them correctly.

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 13/02/2025

(1/3) One of the hardest problems in the world of stream processing is upgrading stateful applications. Why? Because the events never stop, and your application has to handle the events correctly before and after a upgrade and if rewind your position in a topic.

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Chris @chris.blue · 13/02/2025

Had two people ask me for guidance about open source foundations this week. Lots of trepidation around Apache, not much familiarity with CNCF, and curiousity about why I chose Commonhaus for SlateDB. Here are my thoughts:

cnr.sh

Comparing Apache, CNCF, and Commonhaus | cnr.sh

I've used open source projects for over 30 years and contributed for about 20 of those. My first interaction with an open source foundation was with Apache when I began working with Apache Hadoop ...

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 12/02/2025

We mostly use those two terms interchangeably. However, a remote storage solution could also have a disaggregated storage architecture with multiple layers: in-memory, on disk, object store, etc.

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 04/02/2025

Definitely latency is the biggest issue. Our Async processor alleviates that concern completely though. Managed RS3 is practical with and without BYOC because RS3 nodes are very light weight: Kafka is the WAL and S3 is the persistence layer. www.responsive.dev/blog/async-p...

responsive.dev

Async Processing: The Biggest Upgrade for Kafka Streams Since 0.11

Introducing the Async Processor for Kafka Streams, which allows developers to make remote calls from Kafka Streams applications without sacrificing throughput.

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 04/02/2025

Should you use Kafka? If so, when? And what are the tradeoffs presented by the dizzying variety of Kafka-adjacent technologies? I hope that my latest blog post provides unique and useful answers to these questions. Let me know what you all think! 👉 www.responsive.dev/blog/why-whe...

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 04/02/2025

We are going to write more, but here is how RS3 works. Essentially, from Kafka Streams point of view, it's no different from using MongoDB or Cassandra as state, which is something our SDK already supports in production: docs.responsive.dev/storage/rs3

docs.responsive.dev

RS3 | Responsive Documentation

The Responsive Streaming Storage Service (RS3) is a managed state store for Kafka Streams built to be

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 04/02/2025

We are building our storage service with slated as a remote state store for Kafka Streams www.responsive.dev/rs3-storage

responsive.dev

RS3 Streaming Storage | Responsive

Store more with less overhead for Kafka Streams

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Sophie Blee-Goldman @ableegoldman.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Thanks everyone for all the feedback on blog post ideas! Performance and upgrades were most popular so stay tuned for these deep dives - for beginners and advanced users alike Check out our new Kafka Streams 101 site and subscribe to get notified for these and other upcoming lessons! bit.ly/40LWJZL

bit.ly

Kafka Streams 101 | Responsive

Learn to build bulletproof Kafka Streams applications

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 03/02/2025

This is just a tiny sample of what's possible when you embrace the LOG as a core building block. Exciting times ahead!

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 03/02/2025

This will be the foundation for being able to branch @kafkastreams.bsky.social apps to support seamless blue/green deploys. It also allows you to branch a previous version of the state to debug an issue from the past. Powerful stuff coming to the world of stream processing!

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 02/02/2025

I'm enjoying putting the finishing touches on my next blog post on the Why, When, and How of Kafka applications. It's a distillation of my point of view from a decade in the space and I hope it's as useful to read as it was fun to write. Coming Tuesday!

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 30/01/2025

Great analogy. It's like the team mate sitting on the desk next to you who you can spitball with at any time.

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 30/01/2025

I've used ChatGPT and/or Gemini to brainstorm ideas for presenting concepts visually multiple times recently. They have unlocked ideas I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. And sometimes, they generate the graphics. For the rest, Figma is perfect. It's such a major boost either way!

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 29/01/2025

(2/2) And Kafka Streams EXTENDS Kafka and itself is modular and thus EXTENSIBLE. So it can run self-contained on your laptop and yet scale to 100k+ events/s on 100's of TBS of state WITHOUT having to change anything application code. Super bullish about its future given these trends.

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 29/01/2025

(1/2) Perfectly put. At the very end you mentioned composable data systems as a trend that enables flexible deployments. Kafka with it's rebalance, transactional, queing (coming soon) protocols with a durable log is the perfect base layer for composable stream processing.

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ScyllaDB @scylladb.com · 29/01/2025

How did Responsive simplify its architecture and achieve monstrously high availability with unlimited scale potential? Co-founder @almog.ai will share how replacing RocksDB with #ScyllaDB in #Kafka Streams led to big wins for their team at Monster Scale Summit. www.scylladb.com/monster-scal...

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 28/01/2025

The first of our Kafka Streams 101 Series. Practical knowledge on thinking about windowing and time in @kafkastreams.bsky.social We are going to ship new tutorials regularly over the next few months, and you can find them all here: www.responsive.dev/resources/ka...

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 27/01/2025

Excited to read this. I can't tell you how many times 'data observability' has come up in conversations in the last month. It's a wild west when it comes to streaming systems!

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 26/01/2025

I’m super curious too.. will be massive if such a system works.

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 24/01/2025

Makes sense. Thanks for sharing!

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 24/01/2025

Great article! your approach reminds me a lot of Causal Logging (eg. Lineage Stash: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...) I'm curious though: what was missing in Kafka that motivated the introduction another log inside Restate?

dl.acm.org

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Almog @almog.xyz · 23/01/2025

There are some learnings that only come from having seen a wildly successful technology go from a nascent project to ubiquitous. These insights can change the trajectory for new tech. Jason's summary about error handling is a great read for practical engineers: github.com/slatedb/slat...

github.com

API Error Guidance · Issue #454 · slatedb/slatedb

Dumping a few thoughts on API errors. At the moment, we have a single flat error SlateDBError which is exposed through the public API. This is the same pattern used in Kafka and there are some less...

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 15/01/2025

Sophie arguably has the best @kafkastreams.bsky.social blog posts on the internet. Now you get a say on what she should write about next!

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 04/01/2025

💯 it's for exactly this reason that we introduced a design module at Confluent where the candidate would have to explain the design of a system they built in their previous job. It really tests the depth of understanding and communication of the candidate and precludes the interviewer from imposing.

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 03/01/2025

OTOH, a bad interviewer will try to force fit a specific set of solutions, and then you have virtually no good signal from the interview.

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Apurva Mehta @apurvamehta.com · 03/01/2025

I've found that the signal you get from this question is highly dependent on the interviewer. If you have a good interviewer, it becomes a discussion where explore the solution space with breadth and depth. In the process, you can understand a lot about the candidate.

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