Kafka Summit is Here

We at Confluent are pleased to announce that the inaugural Kafka Summit, the first global summit of the Apache Kafka community, is happening today at the Hilton in San Francisco.

Sponsored and created by Confluent, this first event has already beaten all expectations and demonstrates the incredible growth of this technology across organizations, countries and industries. As the conference chair, I’m delighted to welcome more than 600 attendees from five countries speaking 27 languages, and our 12 sponsors, who have demonstrated their commitment to the success of the Kafka community.

We want to thank our conference sponsors for their support for the Kafka community. These partners enrich our experience with Kafka by bringing their technologies together with it to  make it even easier to build Kafka-based systems. Sponsors include Citus Data, DataDog, GEDigital, Heroku, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, LinkedIn, MapR, Mesosphere, Microsoft, OpsClarity, Qubole, SignalFX and Striim. We also want to thank the Apache Software Foundation, O’Reilly (our media partner), and of course the conference organizers at Confluent who made all of this possible.

We hosted a hackathon Monday evening with the goal of creating new connectors to release to the Kafka community, More than 100 participants joined—twice as many as expected—and many stayed long after the 10 p.m. close. The winners of the hackathon were:

• First place: Aravind Yarram of Equifax, for the creation of a Jenkins connector
• Second place (tied): Ashish Singh from Cloudera, for an end-to-end Twitter sentiment analysis connector
• Second place (tied): the Silicon Valley Data Science team, with a connector for a brain monitoring device

Look for these contributions in the Confluent Hub soon!

For those who are in attendance, we hope you have a great show. Please use the Kafka Summit app to communicate with the committee organizers and provide your feedback, and feel free to join the conversation live on the #kafkasummit hashtag on Twitter. For those who aren’t able to attend, don’t worry, we’ll be posting all the session videos online for you in the coming weeks.

Here’s to the first of many outstanding Kafka Summits!