Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Get Kafka-Nated S2E3: Yingjun Wu on Streaming Databases, SQL-First Processing, and Real-Time Data

March 11th, 4PM GMT Yingjun Wu is the founder and CEO of RisingWave Labs, a company building a distributed SQL database for stream processing, with over a decade of experience spanning academic research and large-scale production systems. In this episode we'll be sitting down for a coffee and a conversation with Yingjun's about what a streaming database actually is, how message brokers and streaming databases fit together in real-world architectures, and what his journey from database researcher to founder has taught him.

Making the Case for Vendor-Backed Puppet Core

Thousands of organizations rely on open source community builds for infrastructure automation. But if you're tasked with certifying, maintaining, and patching those builds yourself, you know the burden firsthand. The reality is that managing open source internally consumes time, introduces risk, and diverts resources from higher-value initiatives. When critical vulnerabilities emerge, your team scrambles to assess, test, and deploy fixes, all while keeping production environments stable.

Why we open-sourced AURA: Infrastructure for production AI

Over the last year, I’ve talked to dozens of SRE teams about AI. The excitement is real, but conversations hit a wall when we get to production reality. How does an agent manage complex context without losing the plot? How does it avoid hallucinating relationships between signals? Who owns the orchestration logic that ties it all together? We realized the bottleneck wasn’t model intelligence. It was the lack of a reliable logic layer between the data and the model.

Elephant in the Room, Episode 3: Building a CFP Review Platform with PostgreSQL & Django Live

In Episode 3 of Elephant in the Room, we move from discussion to delivery with a hands-on, live build of a real, community-focused application. Join Jay Miller, Abigail Mesrenyame Dogbe and Andres Pineda as they collaboratively design and build a CFP (Call for Proposals) review platform using PostgreSQL and Django. The aim: create a practical tool that helps speakers receive better feedback and helps organisers discover new and diverse voices.

ODBC Driver for MySQL: Open-Source vs Commercial (2026)

The MySQL ODBC driver is what keeps BI tools, reporting systems, and ETL pipelines connected to MySQL without errors. Teams have depended on it for years, and it’s still vital today, especially with MySQL ranked worldwide in February 2026. However, not all ODBC drivers are built alike. There are two categories: open-source options and commercial ones. While both connect applications to MySQL, they differ in areas like stability, performance, security, and support.

Log Management for your Homelab with Fluentd and Aiven for PostgreSQL

Tired of not knowing why your home lab containers are crashing? In this video, we’ll walk through how to set up a consolidated logging pipeline using Aiven for PostgreSQL (with TimescaleDB), Fluentd and Grafana — all running on my upgraded Mac Mini home lab. The key insight: never keep your troubleshooting tools on the same machine that's giving you problems!

Get Kafka-Nated S2E2: Viktor Kessler on Apache Iceberg, OSS, and Community

In this episode, we sit down with Viktor Kessler, co-founder of Vakamo, major contributor to Lakekeeper, and organiser of Apache Iceberg Meetup Europe, to explore the evolving world of Apache Iceberg. From architectural deep dives to open-source governance, Viktor shares insights from building an Iceberg REST catalog in Rust, launching a company around open data governance and growing the European Iceberg community from Dublin to Vilnius.

Elephant in the Room, Episode 4: Protecting Customer Data with PostgreSQL Anonymizer & Django

In Episode 4 of Elephant in the Room, we tackle a question many teams struggle with: how do you protect sensitive customer data from your own developers while still running and improving your web application? Join Jay Miller (Aiven) and Tim Schilling of Djangonaut Space as they explore a real-world privacy challenge. Djangonaut Space’s application process requires collecting personal information from applicants, but reviewers and contributors should not have access to identifying details. The goal: enable fair review and active development without exposing sensitive data.