Apache Kafka 2024 Review

Welcome to our 2024 year in review!

It’s been a year of growth, learning, and community building at OSO. Our work with Event Driven Architecture (EDA) and Apache Kafka has been challenging but super rewarding, marked by a few huge milestones that have shaped our trajectory and vision. Thanks for sticking with us and supporting our mission of democratising access to Kafka technology! Here’s what we’ve accomplished so far.

This year, we invested in growing the London community. We hosted nine meetups, brought together 470 new members passionate about technology and innovation, produced 19 articles and blog posts, shared insights through three podcasts, and developed 35 code repositories. We also delivered four webinars, each aimed at demystifying technical challenges for the Kafka community, and even sponsored our first open-source project, EventCatalog.

💻 1 open source project sponsorship
📅 9 meetups organised
✍️ 19 articles and blog posts
🎙 3 podcasts
📚 35 code repositories built
📼 4 webinars
🏢 470 New Meetup members

What were our biggest professional achievements?

Beyond the numbers, we worked on some incredible projects. Breaking into the automotive industry by supporting work with Volvo and a Formula 1 team was a major accomplishment, and our co-hosted dinner with Redpanda was another huge highlight, demonstrating that we’re committed to exploring (and testing!) technical boundaries.

What did we learn?

One of our biggest lessons in 2024 was understanding the art of scaling a professional services company, especially learning how to balance resource management, project scheduling, and strategic foresight. Reading Dan Martell’s ‘Buy Back Your Time’ helped us navigate strategic hiring and team building, and we realised that we’re looking for extreme self-starters as OSO expands in 2025. (Is this you? Drop us a line!)

Our ‘building’ philosophy also crystallised around a simple, powerful strategy: show up with a bias for action. Instead of getting trapped in analysis paralysis, we’ve learned to move forward, learn, and adapt quickly, focusing on the 20% of actions that drive 80% of OSO’s growth, one of which will be our new educational offerings and YouTube content.

What trends are we excited to explore?

As we head into 2025, we’re watching two developments. First, the shift-left architecture, where Kafka serves as the write interface for analytics datasets, promises to eliminate costly enterprise tooling, offering more streamlined and efficient data management, especially for companies that want to switch away from Databricks and Snowflake. Using a Kafka to Iceberg workflow, you can combine transactional and operational data in one place for the first time, a huge step forward in enabling real-time analytics.

Second, the development of AI chips like those from Groq. From what we’ve seen at OSO, chips like these could create more seamless integrations between Apache Kafka and real-time data feeds, solving some of the trickier technical challenges in the area. (Check back in with the blog in a few months; we’ll have new thoughts & updates.)

What’s the plan for 2025?

Democratising access to Apache Kafka expertise is at the heart of our mission, so we’ll be launching an educational service designed to support new Kafka enthusiasts entering the industry, breaking down the barriers that can make this technology seem more intimidating to new developers.

We’re also committed to creating content that empowers developers and technical professionals to solve real-world problems, which means our YouTube channel will become another key resource on technical guidance for common Apache Kafka challenges.

All in all, we’re proud of our community, thrilled about our growth potential, and committed to continuous project and product development for the Kafka community.

Here’s to the year ahead!