We invited Anna Povzner, director of engineering at Confluent, to the show to discuss Kora. Kora is a Cloud Native platform based on Apache Kafka, which her team at Confluent built. Anna and her team recently published a paper about Kora in VLDB 2023, and it won the industry's best paper award. Kora VLDB paper: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p3822-povzner.pdf In our conversation, we discussed: - Capacity abstractions for serverless Kafka - Reconciling design constraints into a cohesive architecture - Key components of the architecture: Rebalances, quotas, cells. - How to drive deep technical innovation at a fast-growing company - Delivering low and predictable latency with Apache Kafka