IN Person! Apache Kafka® - May 2026

Learn how adding schema IDs to Kafka headers makes data more trustworthy, plus meet engineers who work with streaming data daily.

Ravi Bhardwaj from Confluent walks through a practical shift in how Kafka clusters handle schema validation: moving schema IDs from message payloads into record headers, which reduces the risk of breaking downstream systems during migrations. Liz Fong from Honeycomb also speaks (her specific topic is being finalised). You'll get into the real mechanics of this approach, migration strategies for existing clusters, and why it matters for data trustworthiness across your infrastructure. The crowd is engineers working with streaming data, so conversations during the networking slots tend to dig into actual implementation challenges rather than surface-level theory.