Building an event streaming platform requires careful consideration of several key factors to achieve scalability, simplicity, and reliability. The first step is to limit the number of Kafka clusters to a central repository with all data streams, which simplifies system architecture and reduces integration points. Standardizing on a single data format for events is also crucial, as it eliminates low-value syntactic conversions and makes data flow easier to reason about. This requires choosing an efficient and widely supported format such as Apache Avro, and using clients that are battle-tested in production, like librdkafka. Additionally, structuring messages as events rather than commands can simplify data modeling and processing, and leveraging Kafka Connect's plug-in API can create reusable connectors for integrating with various systems and applications.