Kafka at ING has a long history. It all started in 2014 when Kafka was introduced to support our use-cases for fraud detection. The following years saw Kafka growing until 2018 when it took the spotlight at ING as the #1 searched-for technology with an unprecedented adoption curve. Suddenly what was a small trickle of niche use-cases, became a flood of customers on-boarding for every imaginable usage pattern. Even more astonishing was that our single cluster configuration saw almost 700% load increase just in 2018. During the explosion our team was so busy with on-boarding, maintenance and ops that it wasn't clear whether we were supporting or sabotaging our long-term success. It was clear that we needed to challenge our view of how we used Kafka. We asked ourselves: given the demand, how can our clients easily manage their streams while not caring about scaling, clusters or technologies. How to provide Kafka to all 40 ING markets with a single experience regardless of country, app or use-case? To answer that we had a to undertake a paradigm shift - from a single-cluster on premise to multi-cluster hybrid cloud, from ops to self-service, from cluster-based to event-first architecture. In this talk we share our journey of how we completely re-imagined Kafka at ING while serving our clients at lightning speed. We would like to discuss our experience of running a single cluster with more than 1000 topics and show how we made Kafka truly self-service via our Streaming Marketplace. Last, but not least, how the past years of success with Kafka have given us the courage to go all-in on the event-first thinking and never think back, putting ING once again one step ahead. Co-presented by Filip Yonov, Product Owner Kafka @ ING