The Current Status of Current

As the successor to Kafka Summit, Current is critically important to everyone who works in data streaming. I’ve been involved with this series of events in one way or another since 2017, and I couldn’t be happier to still be on the bus as we begin 2026.

Just as the surrounding community is growing, Current is growing with it. Ten years ago, Kafka Summit was laser-focused on Apache Kafka®. Kafka was a new technology then, and its burgeoning community was keenly interested in learning anything it could about how to operate clusters and implement elementary new Kafka features. Together, we were just beginning to understand Kafka’s impact on the systems we were building. But—as you’ve heard on the keynote stage at Kafka Summit and then Current—some of us could see that it was already fundamentally reshaping software and data architectures.

Today, those changes have come to pass, and an enormous ecosystem has emerged with them. Kafka is powering not just new applications and data architectures but also startups, products, books, podcasts, Meetup groups, and even whole seasons of people’s careers—all orbiting around the same gravitational center. And as the technology world is transformed again by AI, these past ten years look like a decade-long bootcamp preparing the community for the daunting data systems we now have the privilege of building, with Kafka still at the core.

Data streaming now impacts an increasingly diverse set of disciplines, and it requires an equally wide range of practices to build everything from event-driven applications to next-generation analytics to real-time AI data pipelines. That depth and breadth requires a growing community to share ideas, hone skills, and explore what’s next. Starting this year, we’re going to be intentional about staying in orbit around our Kafka center while also working to make Current feel like home to the ever more diverse set of professionals who need what it has to offer.

What’s on the Horizon – Current 2026 Updates

Whether you’re an AI engineer, an application developer, a data engineer, or an operator running a hundred on-prem clusters sending a billion messages every Tuesday, Current is for you. To reflect that, Current is getting bigger and becoming more inclusive of the community it exists to serve.

Which brings me to some things you should know in 2026:

• We’re replacing Current Bengaluru with a free, one-day Data Streaming World Tour (DSWT) event. I personally spoke at several DSWT events in India last year, so I can attest that these are wonderful, technically focused events that you absolutely should attend if you’re a developer or a technology executive in the area. They’re more Confluent-focused than the community-oriented Current, but—and I may be biased here—that’s hardly a disadvantage!

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  And because even a Confluent event is not just about Confluent, this new event will be co-located with a Partner Summit. We’re moving the original date to avoid overlapping with another very important event that a partner is hosting around the same time, so stay tuned for details.

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• We’re also adding a DSWT stop in Mumbai, which will include an attached Executive Summit.

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  Last year’s Mumbai event was just the Executive Summit, but this year, we’re covering both builders and buyers with two parallel events.

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• You may recall that we held the U.S.-based Current event in New Orleans last year. I’m delighted to report that the flagship Current this year will be in San Francisco—which, as a long-time resident of Denver, I’m forced to admit is the real center of data streaming and AI innovation. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this change. If we want a bigger, broader Current, this is how we do it! Watch this space for dates and other details. There’s a lot coming.

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• And just in case you thought we weren’t serious about that broader Current, we’re holding a one-day event at the end of March that will focus entirely on data engineering. This mini-Current will be free to all comers, and I’m excited to say that we’ve lined up some of the best minds in the business to help us nail down the program and spread the word. We’ll share more details as soon as they’re available.

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• Happily, Current London will go on as planned—no date or venue changes, and no need to wait for another announcement. Just sign up to be informed when registration opens, and I’ll see you there.

Join the Data Streaming Community at Current

For a decade now, Current and Kafka Summit before it have been the definitive places to gather with the people who knew just how transformative data streaming was going to be. Today, that transformation is only picking up speed, and Current is accelerating with it.

Current has been and will continue to be the world’s premiere data streaming event, open and welcoming to the same community that’s been here all along: developers and architects looking to learn and share knowledge, vendors looking to grow their data streaming business, executive-level folks looking to find data streaming partners that can help them deliver dramatically more value to their customers. This is the community that we’ve all built together, and Confluent is committed to continuing to nurture it. Watch this space to learn more—and let’s be sure to get a selfie together wherever we meet this year.

Apache®, Apache Kafka®, and Kafka® are registered trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by the use of these marks.