Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

At Lenses, our goal has always been to help organizations get the most out of their streaming data. We started with visibility into the Apache Kafka, moving up to the part that drives value, the application layer and now the Agentic layer. Lenses 6 moved us into a multi-Kafka world, as increasing, our clients aren’t just running on one type of Kafka anymore, and as sovereign cloud becomes increasingly topical (no pun intended) this is only increasing.

Jonas Best & Patrick Polster Kafka migrations are one of the riskiest infrastructure projects a platform team can take on. Miss a dependency and a downstream app starts reprocessing events it already handled leading to breaking SLAs and eroding trust with application teams. Migrate without visibility and you risk a major production issue. The instinct is to reach for a replication tool and call it done. But replication is only one piece of the puzzle.

In 2025, Model Context Protocol (MCP) captured the imagination of the AI engineering community. 2026 will be the year that everyone realises their prototypes need to run in production.