Explore a conference talk on building Kafka-based microservices using Akka Streams and Kafka Streams. Dive into streaming architectures, data backplanes, and the benefits of Kafka in solving distributed systems problems. Learn about Kafka Streaming, comparing it with alternatives like Spark and Flink. Examine the differences between Akka and Kafka, events vs. messages, and the concept of event time vs. processing time. Discover how to achieve exactly-once processing and explore practical examples using Scala API, Kafka topics, and stream builders. Gain insights into running microservices, implementing Akka Streams, and writing Kafka Streams code. Conclude with a discussion on production tradeoffs, including latency considerations and backpressure management in streaming architectures.