Christoph Schubert

""Almost nobody plans to run a shared data streaming platform from day one on. One team stands up Kafka for one use case. A second asks for a topic. Eighteen months later it's carrying revenue-critical traffic, has forty producers, no defined owner, and a governance model built on tribal knowledge. This talk is an honest account of what Kafka adoption does to an organisation across people, process and technology: the platform team that became a ticket queue, the approval process living in a spreadsheet, the permissions model that couldn't express the actual policy, and the incidents that followed. The failure modes recur regardless of scale — unclear ownership, invisible cost, unenforceable data contracts, and access control that stops at the topic boundary. It then looks forward. Agents are now reading and acting on live data, raising the bar for identity, field-level control and blast-radius containment. The closing section sets out what a genuinely governed multi-tenant platform requires: self-service without central bottlenecks, and policy enforced at the protocol layer rather than in documentation.""

Managing an enterprise-wide Kafka platform is not easy! How to prevent the operations team from drowning in tickets without turning the platform into an un-governable mess of over-partitioned or empty topics and abandoned connectors? We will trace Vattenfall's journey out of this mess into a well-governed Kafka platform where teams have the freedom to create resources and manage access without platform team involvement. On this platform, data is easily discoverable and categorized with metadata. At the same time, application teams are guided toward following best practices using a policy-as-code approach. Join us to find out how to leave the chaos behind and reach a point where both platform and application teams can focus on their core competencies. By attending this session, your contact information may be shared with the sponsor for relevant follow up for this event only.