Everything that is not dead is developing. Plants and animals develop. Friendships develop. Organizations develop. And while data infrastructure is rightly considered not to be a living thing, event streaming platforms develop too. The lens of development as a phenomenon brings clarity to the future direction of Apache Kafka/Confluent Platform, as we see the elements of a completed streaming platform combining with the properties of a cloud-native system to produce a mature platform capable of things earlier versions of itself could not envision. Warm milk and repeated viewings of Frozen will no longer do. It is time for Kafka’s future.