Let’s be honest: who wants to have more than one client to connect to a data system? Now consider Apache Kafka. It ships with four different Java clients: producer, consumer, admin, and streams. Want to create a topic in a producer application? Use the admin client and the producer client. Want to produce and consume? Either use the producer and the consumer, or use Kafka Streams. So how did we get here? And more importantly: how can we simplify it? Are incremental improvements enough? In this talk, we’ll propose a radical approach: a single unified Java client built from scratch for producing, consuming, processing, and administration tasks. We take you on a brainstorming session about what we can and cannot do, and what we want to achieve. How can we make simple things easy and difficult things possible? What does a modern Java API look like, using the standard library, a reasonable threading model, lambdas, and futures for async calls? We think it's high time that we take another look at the Java clients and build a client ready for the next decade. Come and join the conversation about the future of Kafka clients.