Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

If 2024 was the year enterprises adopted Generative AI, 2025 is the year Agentic AI became a reality. In the last six months, the conversations I’m having with engineering leaders have quickly shifted from simple chatbots to AI-enabled IDEs, copilots and autonomous systems that take action. This has to a large part been helped thanks to MCP. To date there have been 10,000+ MCP integrations built by the community, so to say it is a success is an understatement.

Imagine an airline system monitoring traffic around an airport. If it detects a major delay, countless systems may need to react instantly: Ground operations to adjust flows. Some of these systems will still connect via API, traditional MQ or iPaaS technologies, but the data’s volume and urgency and the ease of decoupling apps make architecting with Kafka the better fit. The natural question is: should all these applications & systems connect to the same Kafka cluster?

Kafka cluster-to-cluster data replication is critical to many use cases: disaster recovery (DR), cloud or data center migration, testing applications with production-like data, and multi-region data distribution. Easy replication of data between clusters: The business case is clear, but the cost model is not. Some solutions appear free but impose heavy operational burden.