October 2023 Summaries

Essendant, a wholesale distribution and fulfillment services company, has adopted Klaw, an open-source tool by Aiven, to improve Apache Kafka® governance. The adoption of Klaw helps manage the hundreds of topics created in Kafka, enhancing regulatory compliance and optimizing its efficiency. Essendant's use of Kafka has grown over time, initially supporting analytics for a specific product line and later being used by the order-entry team to store thousands of events daily. With Klaw, teams can submit requests for new topics and schemas in Kafka, as well as access authorizations and connectors. The adoption of Klaw has increased agility within Essendant's teams and improved decision-making capabilities.

Alterra Bills, an Indonesian bill payment aggregator, has successfully increased its smart billing system's success rate to 95% and achieved a 40% cost reduction by utilizing Aiven for Apache Kafka®. The company processes millions of transactions each month, generating huge volumes of data that require robust infrastructure support. By using Aiven for Apache Kafka, Alterra Bills has significantly improved payment success rates, can deliver insightful data faster to the business for decision-making and has saved 40% on costs.

Holger Hammel, VP Engineering in Product at Aiven, shares his insights on the company's engineering culture, values, and projects. Hammel highlights the importance of contribution to the code base, reliability, security, operational awareness, task automation, and end-to-end ownership of teams for product streams. He also discusses how these values translate into hiring, emphasizing high standards and a focus on open source. Hammel shares some recent projects, such as Pgvector (vector search in Postgres), event-streaming ecosystem improvements, and the introduction of free tiers for many products. These projects contribute to Aiven's mission of being the trusted open-source data platform for everyone. Hammel also discusses how Aiven supports professional development for engineering team members by encouraging exploration of different parts of the Aiven platform and learning new programming languages or technologies. He offers advice for anyone wanting to join the engineering team, emphasizing the importance of getting to know the team and code base and being open to sideways thinking.