From Queues to Logs and Back Again
Viktor Gamov, Confluent
Thu, Nov 5, 1:30–2:15 PMRoom 2000
Welcome to a brief history of messaging, told as a story of constraints falling away. I will start in the era of the queue, when a broker's job was to move a message and forget it. Around 2011, Kafka inverted the model: keep messages, make the log durable, and let consumers replay history instead of reading it once. That one idea reshaped our architectures (stream processing, event sourcing) and turned a messaging system into the place where companies keep their source of truth.
Fast forward to now: ZooKeeper is gone, storage is moving to object stores, and queues are returning to Kafka via shared groups.
And we look forward. We made data durable and replayable. It's time to hand that substrate to AI agents that need memory, context, and a record of what just happened. I'll make the case that the messaging layer is where agentic systems will live.
Whether you run anything with "MQ" in the name, you'll leave with a map of how we got here and a strong opinion about where we're headed.
Speaker
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Viktor Gamov
Principal Developer Advocate, Confluent
Viktor Gamov is a Principal Developer Advocate at Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®. With a rich background in implementing and advocating for distributed systems and cloud-native architectures, Viktor excels in open-source technologies. He is passionate about assisting architects, developers, and operators in crafting systems that are not only low-latency and scalable but also highly available.
As a Java Champion and esteemed speaker, Viktor is known for his insightful presentations at top industry events such as JavaOne, Devoxx, Kafka Summit, and QCon. His expertise spans distributed systems, real-time data streaming, JVM, and DevOps. Viktor has co-authored “Enterprise Web Development” and “Apache Kafka® in Action”. Follow Viktor on X @gamussa to stay updated with Viktor’s latest thoughts on technology, his gym and food adventures, and insights into open-source and developer advocacy.