We invited Anna Povzner, director of engineering at Confluent, to the show to discuss Kora. Kora is a Cloud Native platform based on Apache Kafka, which her team at Confluent built. Anna and her team recently published a paper about Kora in VLDB 2023, and it won the industry's best paper award.

Kora VLDB paper: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p3822-povzner.pdf

In our conversation, we discussed:- Capacity abstractions for serverless Kafka- Reconciling design constraints into a cohesive architecture- Key components of the architecture: Rebalances, quotas, cells.- How to drive deep technical innovation at a fast-growing company- Delivering low and predictable latency with Apache Kafka