Interesting Stuff - Week 30, 2020

Throughout the week, I read a lot of blog-posts, articles, and so forth, that has to do with things that interest me:

This blog-post is the “roundup” of the things that have been most interesting to me, for the week just ending.

Machine Learning

A Comprehensive Look at Dates and Timestamps in Apache Spark 3.0. Apache Spark 3.0 was released recently with quite a lot of new features and also changes to existing functionality and data types. This blog post deep dives into the Date and Timestamp types and tries to explain their behavior.

Data Privacy, Security, and Compliance for Apache Kafka. There are increased regulatory demands for protecting personal/sensitive data. The blog post linked to here introduces Privitar Data Privacy Platform, and it looks at how it integrates to Confluent Platform through Privitar Kafka Connector.
Measuring and Monitoring a Stream Processing Cloud Service: Inside Confluent Cloud ksqlDB. This is the third is a series of posts on enhancements to ksqlDB to enable its offering in Confluent Cloud. Very interesting read!
Improved Robustness and Usability of Exactly-Once Semantics in Apache Kafka. Back in 2017, Confluent introduced exactly-once semantics in Kafka. Initially, it was met with a healthy dose of scepticism, but after a while, the doubt died away when people saw it working. This post discusses the recent improvements on exactly-once semantics (EOS) to make it simpler to use and more resilient. We are getting there, my friends!

That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoy what I did put together. If you have ideas for what to cover, please comment on this post or ping me.