Polarising @Kafka Summit ’18

It was really awesome to attend the Kafka Summit in London last April. First of all, because this conference is the only Apache Kafka community event that gathers the most cool data architects, DevOps engineers and developers dedicated to learn and share best practices about writing code and discuss the future of streaming technologies.
So, there we were, captains João Monteiro and Nuno Marques, ready to kick some bad-ass-knowledge at her Majesty land, representing Polarising for the first time. It’s very easy to feel welcome when things are well organized, not just logistically but with an interesting agenda with sessions covering different topics and levels of interest.
The first day of the conference kicked off with two keynotes that made it all worth; Jay Kreps, one of Kafka’s guru’s, talked about “The Death and Rebirth of Event Driven Architecture.”, leaving to Martin Fowler and Toby Clemson to introduce the hot topic of “Enabling Experimentation Using Event Based Systems”.
After this, we had to make tough decisions, as the agenda was divided in three tracks with sessions dedicated to more specialized streams. And both Nuno and I had different missions: Nuno’s focus was mostly related to more technical issues regarding monitoring, maintenance and testing of Kafka infrastructures. And I wanted to get to know real use cases of other companies using Kafka technology.
It was all so good that Nuno is highlighting the following ones :
– “Deploy of Kafka in Docker, Kubernetes and in the Cloud.”
– “How to monitor Kafka “like a pro”.”
– “How to perform tuning to a Kafka cluster.”
– “How to use ‘exactly once semantics’ in Kafka.”
– “War Stories: DIY Kafka.”
– “Testing the Beast.”
– “Excuse you! The 3 most important metrics in Kafka given by Linked-In Todd Palino and one of the authors of the book Kafka: The Definitive Guide.”
As to the stream related with use cases, I was pretty impressed with these:
– “Building low latency, high throughput pipelines with Kafka from scratch.”
– “Event Sourcing over Kafka using Streams.”
– “Building event driven systems with Kafka Streams.”
– “Unlocking the world of stream processing with KSQL.”
– “Powering Olympic Games Coverage through Kafka Streams.”
You can judge for yourself here, where you can find the complete agenda with links to every presentation, all in video and slide support, how cool is that?!
There was still time to party and these people party hard! The music was heaven for anyone who grew up in the 80’s, with lots of arcades and oldie goldies:) It was also great to network with people that knew Polarising, as we are a technology company that delivers software services to fuel so many businesses in Europe.
It was definitely worth attending this conference, almost like in the book “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami (sorry, the comparison is inevitable, since it’s one of my favourite authors!), where two amazing people get together and live an incredible adventure!
Related links:
Confluent Blog
Kafka Summit 2018
JOÃO MONTEIRO (co-piloted by NUNO MARQUES)
Polarising Consultant