The Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) conference is a premier event for data management systems, and Confluent's paper on "Kora: A Cloud-Native Event Streaming Platform For Kafka" was awarded the Best Industry Paper at VLDB 2023. Kora is a next-generation engine that serves the Kafka protocol, designed to provide reliability, elasticity, and cost-efficiency in cloud environments. The system allows users to think in terms of their workload requirements rather than infrastructure, enabling consistent performance across diverse cloud capabilities. Confluent's CEO Jay Kreps wrote about why they built Kora, highlighting market demand for a cloud-native Kafka service that captures the benefits of cloud computing. The development of Kora was a challenging but transformative project that included breakthroughs in cellular architecture, serverless abstraction, and self-balancing clusters. The system has been powering 30,000 Confluent Cloud clusters and thousands of customers, offering better scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.