Orchestrating a Successful Kafka Migration

Migrating a mission-critical Kafka ecosystem is no small feat—especially when that ecosystem powers the backbone of Nordstrom’s digital operations. Supporting over 220 engineering teams, thousands of applications, and an expansive landscape of Kafka topics and streams, this migration to Confluent Cloud was a monumental undertaking.

In this talk, we’ll dive deep into the strategies, tools, and lessons learned from Nordstrom’s Kafka migration journey. From assessing readiness to orchestrating data replication and coordinating across hundreds of teams, we’ll break down the critical components that made this migration a success.

While Kafka was the star of the show, we also leveraged tools like Temporal to streamline and automate key workflows, helping us manage long-running processes and reduce operational risks. Temporal played an essential role in ensuring seamless coordination, but the real focus is on how we handled Kafka-specific challenges—such as maintaining data integrity, minimizing downtime, and ensuring business continuity.

Key takeaways include:

- How to plan and execute a large-scale Kafka migration.

Strategies for ensuring zero data loss and uninterrupted streaming.

- Lessons from coordinating diverse teams and applications in a high-stakes migration.

- Whether you’re planning your own Kafka migration or simply want insights into managing large-scale streaming infrastructure, this talk will provide practical knowledge and real-world examples you can apply to your own systems.