The Apache Kafka community recently gathered in Bangalore, India, for the first-ever Kafka Summit in the country, with over 2,500 participants attending both in-person and online. Confluent's Chief Product Officer opened the summit, emphasizing the importance of data streaming and how it can transform businesses. The event featured a range of sessions on various topics, including real-time GenAI with Apache Kafka, Flink SQL, and Tableflow, which allows users to convert Apache Kafka topics to Apache Iceberg tables. Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink introduced AI Model Inference, enabling developers to simplify the development and deployment of AI/ML applications by providing a unified platform for both data processing and AI/ML tasks. The summit also highlighted the challenges of self-managing Flink and Kafka, which can be challenging due to the lack of immediate responsiveness from community support. Confluent Platform for Apache Flink was announced, offering long-term expert support and reducing operational complexity. Additionally, Confluent was named Microsoft's 2024 OSS on Azure Global Partner of the Year, recognizing its commitment to delivering outstanding open source-based applications and infrastructure solutions on Microsoft Azure.