That’s a Wrap! Kafka Summit San Francisco 2018 Roundup

Were you there last week? For as big as that event felt, it’s hard to believe it’s only the third annual Kafka Summit San Francisco. But the view was beautiful and the content was rich.

Of course, given the size of the Apache Kafka^® Community, I can say for sure that most of you were not there. But that’s okay! Session videos are now online.

And it’s always fun to look at the event by the numbers. Here’s what we had this time:

• 4 keynotes
• 20 different food trucks
• 29 sponsors
• 32 countries represented
• 56 sessions over four tracks
• 76 speakers
• 350+ companies
• 1,200+ attendees
• 1,500 tweets made by 608 people
• 2,816 images in the #kafkasummit mosaic
• 8,000+ online views of the keynotes already

Although 8,000 views of the keynotes is a lot, I know that still leaves some of you who haven’t watched them. I really do think they’re all worth your time:

• In Overcome By Events, Confluent Co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps made the case the separate architectures usually employed to address microservices, monitoring, data pipeline and analytic applications really all point to the need for a streaming platform.
• In What’s In Your Topic?, Capital One VP of Streaming Data walked us through how Capital One is building out a streaming platform at scale. The response to this keynote has been fantastic.
• In Is Kafka a Database?, University of Cambridge Martin Kleppmann argues that Kafka has a stronger claim to ACID transactional semantics than any relational database does at scale. Provocative, but compelling.
• Finally, Confluent Co-founder and CTO Neha Narkhede moderated a panel of industry influencers in Stream of Consciousness.

And here’s some of the content that stood out to me:

• Benny Lee and Christopher Arthur of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia continued the trend of sharing long-term enterprise deployment success stories with Kafka in the Enterprise – A Two-Year Journey to Build a Streaming Platform from Scratch.
• I saw a crowd gathered around Randall Hauch for a least a half-hour after he delivered So You Want to Write a Connector?, his tour of the internals and APIs of Kafka Connect.
• Nick Dearden tackled the notoriously difficult topics of how to join streams and tables in their various combinations in Zen and the Art of Streaming Joins. This is essential material for mastering KSQL and Kafka Streams.
• Lyndon Hedderly contributed to our new Business Case track with How to Quantify the Value of Kafka in Your Organization.
• Community powerhouse Stéphane Maarek failed to pull punches (but succeeded in sharing his knowledge) in Kafka Security 101: Real World Tips.
• Wanny Morellato of SAP Concur has been running Kafka in production for eight years or so. In Breaking Down a SQL Monolith with Change Tracking, Kafka and KStreams/KSQL, he takes the novel approach of showing how to refactor a conventional SQL query into Kafka Streams and KSQL code.

I hope you can spend some time with the videos. If you’ve got something to share with the community, start writing an outline, because the the call for papers for Kafka Summit NYC 2019 (April 2, 2019) and Kafka Summit London 2019 (May 13-14, 2019) will be opening soon. I hope to see you there!

Interested in more?

If you’d like to know more, you can download the Confluent Platform, the leading distribution of Apache Kafka.