Event streaming is an increasingly critical infrastructure service used in many industries and there is growing demand for cloud-native solutions. Confluent Cloud provides a massive scale event streaming platform built on top of Apache Kafka with tens of thousands of clusters running in 70+ regions across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. This paper introduces Kora , the cloud-native platform for Apache Kafka at the core of Confluent Cloud. We describe Kora's design that enables it to meet its cloud-native goals, such as reliability, elasticity, and cost efficiency. We discuss Kora's abstractions which allow users to think in terms of their workload requirements and not the underlying infrastructure, and we discuss how Kora is designed to provide consistent, predictable performance across cloud environments with diverse capabilities.

The process of hypothesis-driven epidemiological research has three phases - the establishment and characterisation of a large, representative cohort from a geographically distributed population; the integration of the cohort data with other data sources to provide additional characterisation; the formulation of a hypothesis and generation of the corresponding predictions. Grid-computing technologies make possible secure, distributed collaboration, and the ability to share data sources, computational resources and storage resources across administrative boundaries. PsyGrid is an e-Science project established to apply grid-computing technologies to each of the three phases, with the aim of eliminating the obstacles that hinder epidemiological research. We describe a system for distributed cohort characterisation, and the first application to the study of First Episode Psychosis.