Reflections from Current 2025: Two Days of Innovation in Streaming and Data Infrastructure

Current 2025 has officially wrapped, and after 48 hours packed with learning, networking, and insightful discussions, there's much to reflect on. This year’s conference highlighted several significant trends, with one theme rising above the rest: diskless architecture.

The shift towards ultra-low-cost, long-term storage for Kafka was evident across many vendors. Conversations with Aiven, AutoMQ, StreamNative, and Buf revealed a range of mature, innovative approaches to retention-less streaming. These advancements suggest we’re approaching a future where durable storage and real-time analytics can coexist seamlessly.

Streambased Talks

Streambased presented 2 talks at the conference:

• Melting Icebergs: Enabling analytical access to Kafka data through Iceberg projections.
• Kafka Projections: Accessing data from Kafka in new ways.

Both focused on expanding the audience of Apache Kafka to include analysts, data scientists and other data driven decision makers that can reap huge benefits from real-time data.

We went into detail about how our unique and revolutionary Iceberg Service for Kafka (I.S.K.) product works as well as outlining the change in architectural thiking that results in it's creation. Both talks were very well received with great support and insightful questions.

Emerging Trends from Current 2025

Here are a few key themes that stood out:

• Diskless Kafka: Innovative approaches to decoupling storage and compute are becoming production-ready.
• Apache Iceberg Everywhere: From URSA to TableFlow, structured analytics over streaming data is now a must-have.
• Rise of the Kafka Proxy: More tools are entering the space, making access and security more manageable.
• Last Mile Streaming: Delivering data directly to user devices is gaining traction and importance.

Lettuce talk about Iceberg

The omnipresence of Apache Iceberg was clear. The industry’s investment in enabling analytics on streaming data is paying off, with a full ecosystem of solutions now emerging. AutoMQ refers to their implementation as Topic Tables, StreamNative has launched URSA, Confluent introduced TableFlow, and Buf is so integrated with Iceberg that no specific branding is even necessary. Clearly, Iceberg is becoming a standard feature for managed Kafka services, and for those not on a managed path, third-party services such as Streambased’s I.S.K. are bridging the gap.

Here, there proxy everywhere

Another exciting development was the increased activity in the Kafka proxy space. New offerings from Gravitee and Kong Inc. complement existing solutions such as Conduktor. While 2024 may not have fully delivered on the expectation of being “The Year of the Proxy,” 2025 appears to be a strong contender.

The last mile

One of the more surprising and enlightening discoveries from the conference was the concept of last mile streaming. Lightstreamer showcased how real-time data whether from Kafka or other sources can be delivered efficiently to end-user devices such as phones, tablets, and laptops. This focus on the final leg of data delivery opens the door to broader Kafka adoption and user-centric applications.

Streambased Sponsorship

As a leading member of the Kafka community, Streambased sponsored and had a booth at the event. We enjoyed a steady stream of engaging conversations across all industries and company sizes throughout the event. We love conversations like this as they ground our concepts to the people that deploy and use them.

Standouts topics included huge savings by moving analytics functions upstream away from BigQuery into Kafka natively and employing MCP to provide an easy to use and powerful interface into real-time data.

Personal Highlights

Beyond the technical sessions, the conference also delivered on the community front. Reconnecting with industry peers and meeting new contributors to the ecosystem remains one of the most rewarding aspects of in-person events. A special mention goes to the team at Evoura for their ongoing contributions to the Kafka community and for hosting a memorable community dinner to close out the event.

Lastly, thanks are due to the Confluent team for organizing a top-tier conference. The support provided to speakers and sponsors alike helped create a welcoming, engaging environment for all attendees.

With plans already in motion for Current New Orleans, the countdown has begun. Looking forward to another round of innovation, connection, and inspiration. See you there!