# Kafka at EchoStar | Akshara Madduluri & Shreshth Rathod | Voices of the Kafka Community

[Voices of the Kafka Community](https://www.conduktor.io/voices-of-the-kafka-community)

# Kafka at EchoStar: Less Ops Overhead, More Guardrails

Guest

Akshara Madduluri

Data Engineer, EchoStar

Guest

Shreshth Rathod

Data Engineer, EchoStar

Host

[Ron Kapoor](https://www.conduktor.io/authors/ron-kapoor)

Technical Product Marketing, Conduktor

Akshara Madduluri and Shreshth Rathod are data engineers at EchoStar. Akshara owns the observability stack and Kafka and is now moving into hosting AI gateways; Shreshth works across Python, Spark, Kafka and Grafana. Recorded at Current, they talk through what running Kafka costs a small team day to day, and what changed when they stopped managing brokers themselves.

## In this conversation

- →Why scaling a self-managed Confluent Platform cluster on EC2 took eight to ten hours of Ansible runs

- →Moving to a diskless, S3-backed Kafka platform on EKS that autoscales under load

- →The one feature on their Kafka wishlist: rebalancing without the inter-AZ bill

- →What it takes to trust an agent in production: scoped skills and explicit guardrails

[Akshara Madduluri and Shreshth Rathod on running Kafka at EchoStar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s82kvdSLBhM)

"Scoping the skills of the agent is one of the biggest things I've focused on. Saying, okay, this agent is allowed to do this."

Akshara Madduluri, Data Engineer at EchoStar

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