Jakub Scholz

March is here. And that means #KubeCon starts in a few weeks. With Paolo Patierno, we will talk about #Strimzi 1.0.0 in the maintainer track. And for the first time, we will also have a Strimzi kiosk in the project pavilion. Hope to see you in Amsterdam!

Just a small change ... but another big step towards the #Strimzi 1.0.0 release ...

And that was another week of my life I will never get back 😫.

Finding CVEs in your own project sucks. No sense of achievement, no feeling of accomplishment. Just banging my head against the desk because I didn't find this during the review. 🤦‍♂️🤷‍♂️

Release 0.50.1 · strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ SECURITY: Strimzi 0.50.1 addresses CVE-2026-27133 and CVE-2026-27134. If you use Strimzi 0.47.0 or newer, please read the advisories and if you are affected, please upgrade to 0.50.1. ⚠️ I...

We have released #Strimzi 0.50.1. This patch release addresses a few minor bug fixes and dependency updates. It also fixes two new Strimzi CVEs: CVE-2026-27133 and CVE-2026-27134! Please check the new release and the CVEs, and upgrade if needed:

➡️ github.com/strimzi/stri...

Last chance to apply for the current term of LFX Mentorship. One of the projects is a #Strimzi plugin for the @headlamp.dev ... github.com/headlamp-k8s...

4/4 Stage three:
* The snow piled on the side of the cleaned sidewalks starts to melt, the water flows onto the sidewalk, and freezes overnight ... it is hard to walk on it again
* The snow on the uncleaned sidewalks melted away and they now dry and easy to walk on

3/4 Stage two:
* The cleaned sidewalks are now dry and easy to walk on
* On uncleaned sidewalks, the fresh snow turned into ice, and the uncleaned sidewalks are now hard to walk on

2/4 Stage one:
* The sidewalks that were cleaned of the fresh snow were not cleaned properly and are icy, slippery, and hard to walk on
* The uncleaned sidewalks still have the fresh snow on them and are easy for walking

1/4 The 3 stages of the recent snow in Prague through the lens of my midnight walks ...

YouTube video by Jakub Scholz In-Place Pod Resizing in Strimzi

2/2 So I put together a prototype youtu.be/983tFK2327A and a proposal github.com/strimzi/prop.... Let's see if it helps us to build something useful in the future ... 🤔

1/2 In-place Pod resizing was one of the interesting features that graduated to stable in #Kubernetes 1.35. While in-place changes to memory are limited in Java, it might help to give #Strimzi users some more flexibility.

2/2 It is pretty hard to derail me when I set my sights on some goal 😜

1/2 So far so good ... and according to the plan:

✅ 1.0.0 and v1 CRD API Proposal (September 2025)
✅ Strimzi 0.49 + v1 CRD API (November 2025)
✅ Strimzi 0.50 (January 2026)
🔜 Strimzi 0.51 (February 2026)
🔜 #KubeCon Europe talk (March 2026)
🔜 Strimzi 1.0.0 (April 2026)

4/4 Or will it be that the world where AI does everything does not need clean code and APIs anymore, because - unlike humans - the AIs using the API can deal with it easily?

3/4 But how will this work in the AI world? AI seems to love messy spaghetti code, where you just add new features over the others. Will it learn how to do a clean and future-proof API design one day? Will it know when to refuse the new feature and instead request a refactoring?

2/4 Almost every developer can add support for yet another feature by adding gazillion new options into a messy API. But it takes a lot of experience to know when to pause and do some refactoring first in order to have a nice and clean design.

1/4 Maintaining a project is not just about new features and bug fixes. You need long-term thinking, planning, and design. You have to make sure your APIs have the right shape, are easy to use, and can be extended again in the future. You have to deal with technical debt. Etc.

YouTube video by Strimzi What's new in Strimzi 0.50.0

Start a new week with a new #Strimzi release: Strimzi 0.50.0 is out! Check out our "What's New" video and the release notes, and start upgrading:

🎬 youtu.be/BPNt4Z7g3p4
🔗 github.com/strimzi/stri...

Yesterday was not just the last day of 2025, but also my last day at Red Hat. Now I'm looking forward to what 2026 will bring ...🤞

Release 0.7.0 · scholzj/kekspose Main changes since 0.6.x 0.7.0 introduces a new proxyless model. It no longer uses a Kafka proxy deployed inside the Kubernetes cluster in an additional pod. Instead, all proxying is done directly ...

3/3 Give it a try in the new 0.7.0 release: github.com/scholzj/keks... ... and if you run into any issues, make sure to open an issue or let me know 😉

2/3 Keksposé now does all the necessary filtering directly while forwarding the ports. That means:
* Less consumed resources in your Kubernetes cluster
* Less RBAC rights needed
* Easier to (k)expose the same Kafka cluster by multiple users at the same time

1/3 Keksposé is going proxyless! You can now access your #Strimzi based #ApacheKafka cluster from your local computer through port-forwarding without creating any Pods and deploying a Kafka proxy inside your Kubernetes cluster.

The usual #Kubernetes release test ...
... aaand #Strimzi seems to work fine on Kubernetes 1.35 😌

9/9 So it is a long way to go ... 😔

8/9 And even if you force a user to contribute a pluggable interface to support the feature they need, you might not get far. Instead of contributing the feature itself, they will often not properly design the pluggable interface because they lack the knowledge and care.

7/9 Keeping it up to date? Updating docs? Testing new releases? It is up to them. Sadly, when you have an existing code base, introducing pluggable interfaces is not simple. You need well-designed and reasonably stable APIs. You cannot change it from one day to another.

6/9 Instead of contributing the initial implementation and dumping the maintenance effort on the project, users can contribute the features to the wider project ecosystem in the form of a plugin. But they remain responsible for the maintenance of the plugin.

5/9 One of the things I regret about not doing more in #Strimzi is pluggability. In the Java-based world, plugins are pretty easy to handle. And I think well-thought-through pluggable interfaces give open source projects a way to spread the maintenance and overhead efforts.

4/9 And that is why the financial sustainability of many open source projects is so challenging. Because the simple one-time payment for the initial contribution is not enough. You need to make sure that the maintainers are paid continuously for ongoing maintenance and other overhead work as well.

3/9 But without ongoing contributions to the maintenance, this approach dumps a lot of maintenance work on the project. That is why, in many cases, these contributions are not exactly eagerly welcomed and are often rejected for the sake of project sustainability.