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Day: September 5, 2025

What’s New in Apache Kafka 4.1.0

Published 2025-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Mickael Maison lays out some changes:

The Apache Kafka community is proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka® 4.1.0. This blog post highlights the many new features and improvements included in this release. For a full list of changes, be sure to check the release notes.

Queues for Kafka (KIP-932) is now in preview. It’s still not ready for production, but you can start evaluating and testing it. See the preview release notes for more details.

This release also introduces a new Streams Rebalance Protocol (KIP-1071) in early access. It is based on the new consumer group protocol (KIP-848).

Read on for another 15 or so completed items.

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A Primer on Markdown

Published 2025-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Robbins introduces Markdown:

Markdown is the standard for writing technical documentation at Microsoft and many other organizations. Its simplicity, readability, and compatibility with other tools make it an ideal choice for blogging, documenting software, procedures, APIs, and more. Whether you’re authoring a user guide, README, or knowledge base article, Markdown enables you to focus on content without getting bogged down in formatting.

As a technical writer, you’re expected to deliver clear, maintainable documentation that works across platforms. Markdown helps you do exactly that, with minimal friction.

The biggest challenge I experience with Markdown is figuring out what’s actually supported in some given implementation of Markdown. Most of the basics will be the same, but as soon as you get into things like nested lists, images, etc., support varies significantly.

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Defending Kubernetes

Published 2025-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni defends the defensible:

I’ve seen a couple of posts (of course they were chock full of AI slop images) on LinkedIn in the last couple of weeks, talking about how challenging it is to implement Kubernetes. In the most recent post I saw, it stated that “it took 5 months for our CEO to implement Kubernetes for our app”, to which I would ask, why the hell is your CEO configuring your clusters. I designed, and implemented the Kubernetes infrastructure on my current project, and I’ve worked on for a while, so of course, I felt the need to share my opinions on the matter.

As far as Kubernetes on-premises goes, there are quite valid reasons to run it on-prem. Yeah, it’s easier to host in AKS or EKS, but that’s not always possible. But regardless of whether you’re hosting on-prem or in a cloud provider, Kubernetes requires solid knowledge across several areas, including networking, storage administration, systems administration, and CI/CD, not to mention the development skills needed for containerization.

I think Joey downplays the skill level required, but I don’t want to err in the opposite direction by overstating the challenge. But if you want anything beyond the bog-standard deployment of AKS/EKS, the “You must be this tall to ride the ride” sign is significantly higher than using other containerized solutions like Azure Application Services/Container Apps or Elastic Container Service.

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Building Storage Tiers with Pure Storage in Powershell

Published 2025-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino creates a medallion storage layout:

In modern IT environments, not all workloads require the same level of storage performance, protection, or cost. Some applications need high performance with aggressive data protection, while others are perfectly fine with lower performance in exchange for cost savings. This tiered approach to storage service delivery is fundamental to efficient infrastructure management.

In my previous post on Fusion, I took an application-centric approach, showing how to deploy SQL Servers using Fusion. Let’s switch gears now and learn how to define a storage service catalog. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to build a complete storage service catalog using Pure Storage Fusion Presets, offering Bronze, Silver, and Gold tiers with optional replication. We’ll see how to leverage different array types (FlashArray //X and FlashArray //C) to optimize both performance and cost across your fleet.

Read on for a link to the code, as well as more information on how it works.

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