Every architecture decision is a bet. Extend, the AI-native commerce platform unifying delivery, returns, exchanges, and warranty claims, made theirs early: 100% serverless, 100% infrastructure as code, and fully event-driven from day one. Those foundational bets now give the company something rare—the space to think about the future of its business instead of maintaining systems. In this episode, Jonathan Kropp, Director of AI & Architecture at Extend, joins Joseph to trace the journey from cloud-native queues to Apache Kafka® on Confluent Cloud. He explains why the lack of persistence, schema enforcement, and replayability in traditional queuing services became a bottleneck, how event source mapping connects Confluent Cloud to their Lambda-based compute layer, and how a serverless stack lets Extend tie every revenue-generating event directly back to technology spend. You'll Learn: How an immutable, replayable event log unlocks future use cases like fraud signals and model training Why schema enforcement earlier in the process stabilizes downstream services at scale How offloading Kafka operations to Confluent Cloud keeps engineers focused on business value, not infrastructure About the Guest: Jonathan Kropp is the Director of AI & Architecture at Extend, where he drives the technical vision and strategy behind a fully serverless, infrastructure-as-code, and test-automated platform. With over a decade of experience in software architecture, cloud computing, and event-driven systems, Jonathan specializes in designing scalable, high-performance solutions that empower developers and accelerate innovation. He leads a team of senior engineers and architects, fostering a culture of technical excellence and developer-first principles, and collaborates closely with executives to align technology with business objectives. Guest Highlight: "We've made a lot of great bets on our foundations, which has then given us that space to think about the future of our business, future of our platform, and the future of engineering. All of those great bets, Confluent being one of them, has allowed us the space to think about the future." Chapters: [00:52] Meet Extend: The Mission [05:29] Data Streaming Goodness: Inside the Event-Driven Platform [06:43] Serverless Strategy & Cost Visibility [09:36] Why AWS Queues Hit Their Limits [16:44] Beyond the Stream: Kafka as the Central Nervous System [34:58] Quick Bytes [37:56] Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways Dive Deeper into Data Streaming: EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation With Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to Turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream Links & Resources: Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant Joseph’s LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant Jonathan’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-kropp-3301b955/ Learn more at Confluent.io Our Sponsor: Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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