Kafka Summit 2019: 3 Big Things!

How many Kafka Summits should there be in a year? Experts disagree. Some say there should be one giant event where everybody gathers at once. Some say there should be one once a month in different regions of the world. Others say you should live every day like it’s Kafka Summit.

As you may know, we have adopted a happy medium: three Summits in 2019.

Three! I still think that’s a lot. Anyway, let me remind you of the dates and places:

• Kafka Summit New York – April 2, 2019
• Kafka Summit London – May 13-14, 2019
• Kafka Summit San Francisco – Sept. 30-Oct. 1, 2019

And each one has its own news associated with it.

San Francisco CFP is open

First, the call for papers for Kafka Summit San Francisco is now open. This is year number four for our flagship event in San Francisco and will be our largest Kafka Summit to date. If that sounds like a place you’d like to speak, please step right up and send us your best abstracts. Even if you don’t want to speak, Kafka Summit has still emerged as the best place to learn more about Apache Kafka^®, event streaming architectures and generally what kinds of problems people are solving in the community today.

If you want to speak at Summit but are new to the speaking game, listen carefully: We want you to speak here. To help you along the submission process, the Confluent Developer Advocate Team is holding online office hours where you can come ask any Summit-related question you want. Overall, this time is focused on helping you craft a strong submission, providing a space for you to bounce ideas off of the developer advocates and providing a place for you to ask whatever else you want to know about speaking at Summit. To take part, join the #summit-office-hours channel in our Slack community at one of these two times:

• March 26, 2019, at 11:00 a.m. PT
• March 28, 2019, at 2:00 p.m. GMT

Kafka Summit London agenda is open

Speaking of all those Summits we agreed to hold, the agenda for London is now public! The Program Committee had a tough job with so many quality submissions (seriously), but we fought our way through it, and the agenda is now live. As you’ll see, we have a terrific lineup of speakers, including the following sessions, which I am particularly excited about:

• Running Kafka in Kubernetes: A Practical Guide, by Katherine Stanley (IBM)
• From Zero to Hero with Kafka Connect, by Robin Moffat (Confluent)
• The Exciting Frontier of Custom KSQL Functions, by Mitch Seymour (Mailchimp)
• When to KSQL & When to Live the KStream, by Dani Traphagen (Confluent)
• The Art of the Event Streaming Application: Streams, Stream Processors and Scale, by Neil Avery (Confluent)
• Industry-Ready NLP Service Framework Based on Kafka, by Berhnard Waltl (BWM Group)

And holding down our keynote sessions in London will be our own Jay Kreps, streaming thought leader Martin Kleppmann and Sky Group Distribution Platform Engineering Leader Keith Davidson.

Check out the full London agenda for more.

Clearly, there’s a lot to look forward to—and Kafka Summit London will be twice as big as it was in 2018!

Training opportunities at Kafka Summit New York

And we are now just six weeks away from Kafka Summit New York. This is a one-day event at Pier 60, and thanks to the ministrations of the Summit Program Committee, this Summit also has a great lineup. Every Kafka Summit thus far has sold out, so it would be reasonable to expect this one to as well. Register soon!

Kafka Summits always come paired with Kafka training. In New York, we have several things to offer:

• An Introduction to Apache Kafka Tutorial on Monday, April 1
• A three-day course on Apache Kafka for Developers starting on Wednesday, April 3
• A three-day course on KSQL and Kafka Streams starting on Wednesday, April 3
• A three-day course called Advanced Skills for Optimizing Apache Kafka starting on Wednesday, April 3.
• A three-day course on Operating Apache Kafka starting on Wednesday, April 3

Having said all of that, there are two things you can do today:

• Register for Kafka Summit New York.
• Register for Kafka Summit London. (Do this by March 1, and you’ll save £200 off the standard pass!)

I really hope to see you at one of these events. If event streaming matters to you, they are not to be missed. See you at the Summit!

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Tim is a teacher, author and technology leader with Confluent, where he serves as the senior director of developer experience. He can frequently be found at speaking at conferences in the U.S. and all over the world. He is the co-presenter of various O’Reilly training videos on topics ranging from Git to distributed systems, and is the author of “Gradle Beyond the Basics.” He tweets as @tlberglund and lives in Littleton, CO, U.S.