Messaging and event streaming sit at the heart of modern distributed systems, yet the landscape has never been more diverse—or more fragmented. Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ continue to power countless enterprise integration and transactional workloads, while Apache Kafka has become synonymous with high-throughput event streaming and the backbone of many data platforms. Alongside them, projects like Apache Pulsar, NATS, and a new generation of protocols and brokers are reshaping expectations around scalability, multi-tenancy, and the convergence of messaging with streaming and storage. This panel brings together maintainers and practitioners from across the open source messaging world to discuss where the ecosystem is heading. How do classic message brokers stay relevant in a streaming-first world? Is the line between “messaging” and “event streaming” disappearing, and what does that mean for the projects and the standards (AMQP, MQTT, the Kafka protocol) that underpin them? How are communities responding to cloud-native deployment, Kubernetes, tiered storage, and the pull toward the lakehouse and unified data architectures? And what role do open governance and healthy contributor communities play in keeping these projects vibrant? Join us for a candid conversation about the technical challenges, the competitive and collaborative dynamics between projects, and the opportunities that lie ahead for developers building on open source messaging infrastructure.
Target Audience:
- Architects, developers and decision makers