I gave a talk on my phased upgrade approach for Strimzi managed Kafka clusters at StrimziCon 2025.

Strimzi handles the upgrade of Kafka clusters for you, making it simple and easy for infrastructure teams to handle these complex operations. The upgrade of the Strimzi operator itself is also straight-forward. However, when you have a large fleet of Kafka clusters being managed by Strimzi, the upgrade will cause all those clusters to roll. There are ways around this and this blog gives an example.

Apache Flink is a huge project and currently has over 1200 open PRs. I sent this message to the dev mailing list going over previous attempts to solve this issue and detailing a proposal to address the problem.

Apache Flink is a huge project with multiple contributions a day. With a limited set of committers, progress on reviewing and merging these contributions can be slow. So I have join an initiative to help out.

It was a only a matter of time after Elon brought the place. I will miss what it was, not what it is…