Data Streaming Journal

Can Kafka Queues Make Consumers Faster? Part 2: Head-Of-Line Blocking

Kafka Queues can scale consumers beyond partitions by reducing head-of-line blocking when message processing has I/O delays.

May 11 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

1

April 2026

Can Kafka Queues Make Consumers Faster?

Kafka Queues promise consumer scaling beyond partitions, but benchmarks show share consumers still lag far behind standard Kafka consumers.

Apr 27 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

1

1

March 2026

Advanced Apache Flink On-Demand Course

A few months ago, I announced the Advanced Apache Flink Bootcamp, a deeply technical training focused on Apache Flink internals, production deployment…

Mar 23 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

3

February 2026

Benchmarking CDC Tools: Supermetal vs Debezium vs Flink CDC

Classic "Big Data" stack vs Rust & Arrow.

Feb 17 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

14

December 2025

Why Apache Flink Is Not Going Anywhere

Not in the next few years.

Dec 3, 2025 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

23

6

1

November 2025

Current New Orleans 2025

Conference highlights.

Nov 3, 2025 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

5

October 2025

Announcing Data Streaming Academy

The best place to master data streaming technologies.

Oct 27, 2025 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

5

Flink Forward 2025

Conference highlights.

Oct 22, 2025 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

4

September 2025

Streaming and the RAD Stack

RAD: Rust, Arrow, DataFusion

Sep 22, 2025 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

6

August 2025

No More Excuses for Stream/Table Duality

Kafka IS your LakeHouse now, accept it.

Aug 18, 2025 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

12

7

May 2025

Current London 2025

Keynote

May 29, 2025 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

7

1

Announcing Irontools

Making Apache Flink more efficient and accessible

May 7, 2025 • Yaroslav Tkachenko

4