DevDay Hyderabad

Engineering Beyond the Broker: Solving Operational Challenges using Kafka

Sat, Sep 5 · 9:30 AM IST

CIE at IIIT Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Te, IN

IMPORTANT: Participants must register through the registration link

Shortlisted candidates would receive a confirmation a few days before the event. As we have a limited number of seats, registration is mandatory, and we recommend registering soon.

About the Event

Kafka is an excellent distributed messaging platform, but operating it at scale often introduces challenges that go beyond message delivery itself. As more teams, applications, and external clients start depending on a Kafka cluster, concerns such as secure access, authorization, governance, auditing, and infrastructure evolution become increasingly important.
In this interactive session, we’ll start with a production-style Kafka deployment and gradually introduce the operational challenges we encountered while evolving it. Together, we’ll evaluate different approaches—from Kafka ACLs and networking improvements to protocol-aware proxies and other alternatives—and discuss the trade-offs behind each decision.

Through live demonstrations and audience-driven discussions, we’ll explore questions such as:

• How should external applications securely access Kafka?
• Are Kafka ACLs sufficient for growing operational needs?
• How do we improve governance and observability without changing every client?
• Should we solve these problems within Kafka, or introduce an additional layer?
• If introducing a proxy is the answer, why Kroxylicious? What are the alternatives?

We’ll also discuss where Kafka itself remains the right choice, where operational tooling complements it, and the trade-offs involved in introducing components such as Kafka protocol proxies.
Rather than presenting a single “correct” solution, this session focuses on the engineering thought process behind evolving a production-style Kafka deployment and making informed architectural decisions.

### What you’ll learn

• Common operational challenges encountered in Kafka deployments as they scale
• Where Kafka ACLs fit—and where they may not be sufficient
• Different approaches for securing and governing Kafka deployments
• How protocol-aware proxies such as Kroxylicious can help address operational concerns
• Trade-offs, limitations, migration strategies, and alternative approaches

### Format

We’re planning this to be an interactive session combining discussion, architecture exploration, and some live demonstrations. We discuss design decisions, evaluate alternative solutions together, challenge assumptions and propose different approaches.

Prerequisites
To get the most out of this session, participants should be familiar with:

• Basic Kafka concepts (topics, partitions, producers, consumers, consumer groups)
• Kubernetes fundamentals
• Networking basics (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS/mTLS)
• General understanding of distributed systems

No prior knowledge of Kafka security, ACLs, or Kroxylicious is required.

🎤 Facilitators

👨‍🏫 Harsh Bandari
Solution Consultant at Sahaj Software with 3 years of experience working on backend systems and enterprise software, primarily in the manufacturing domain. His work spans backend development, event-driven systems, system integration, and cloud infrastructure. He enjoys solving complex technical problems, understanding how systems work under the hood, and sharing practical engineering experiences.

👨‍🏫 Guda Sai Vikhyath Reddy
Solution Consultant at Sahaj Software with 2.5 years of experience across backend development, DevOps, event-driven systems, and cloud infrastructure. He has also worked on AI-integrated applications. He enjoys understanding how systems work from first principles and exploring the engineering behind scalable and distributed systems.

Event Details

• Date: Saturday, Sept 5th, 2026
• Time: 09:30 AM – 01:00 PM (IST)
• Location: 2nd Floor, CIE @ IIIT Hyderabad

Who Should Attend

• 5+ years of hands-on experience
• Fundamentals in System Architecture, Networking Fundamentals, Kubernetes and Asynchronous communication patterns

👉 Important Registration Notice

• All registrations will be waitlisted initially
• Only official confirmation email guarantees entry
• Meetup/platform emails are not confirmation