Kafka Summit Europe 2021 – A Look at the Agenda

As you may have heard, we are hosting not one, not two, but three Kafka Summits in 2021. No matter where you are in the world, there’s a Summit event that will fall into your daytime schedule, or at least part of it. When we say we value the health of the Kafka Community, we mean your sleep too.

Kicking off the year is Kafka Summit Europe 2021 on May 11–12. This is a virtual event, like all of the year’s Summits. You can—and, between you and me, should—check out the entire agenda of breakout sessions, keynotes, and lightning talks, but let me give you some highlights here:

• Jay Kreps will be kicking the keynotes off as per the usual. Following him at lunchtime, I’m really excited to be able to welcome Zhamak Dehghani, who will be talking about Data Mesh. This is an exciting new topic of great interest to those of us in the business of data that moves.
• Have you ever had an outage caused by a message that your consumers couldn’t process? Stripe’s Andrey Falko has. In this talk, he will show us the topic versioning scheme and control plane functionality that he deployed to shrink these outages to a manageable size.
• Adidas’ session will delve into building a next-generation observability system on top of Apache Kafka^®. They’ve been able to keep their systems running in the face of 100 billion messages per day. You’ll gain a lot of insight by standing in their shoes for a moment. You’ll get a kick out of what they have to say. (I could go on.)
• AO (a large electrical retailer in the UK, for my non-UK readers) will tell us the story of how they built out an enterprise-wide data governance framework, including some tooling that they developed in-house and released as open source. I field questions about data governance and Kafka often enough, so I know many of you are interested in this.
• Xiaoman Dong will talk about how Stripe uses Apache Pinot with Apache Kafka for real-time OLAP on half-petabyte tables of financial data.
• Simon Aubury, Principal Data Engineer at ThoughtWorks and Confluent Community Catalyst, looks back on five years of building event-driven systems and gives his slightly younger self advice on how he might have done it better, given the benefit of hindsight.
• Confluent’s Jason Gustafson will give us the goods on the new feature underlying KIP-500 and the removal of ZooKeeper: Kafka’s own implementation of the Raft protocol. This is an important piece of distributed systems technology that you’d want to understand anyway, even apart from its application in Kafka. Check it out.

As always, head to the Kafka Summit site to check out the full agenda and register. And if you’re interested in speaking at a Summit later in the year, I cannot encourage you strongly enough to head to the appropriate one and submit your proposal now:

• Submit to the APAC Kafka Summit
• Submit to the Americas Kafka Summit

And making possible this record-setting three Summit year is the Kafka Summit Program Committee. These folks have spent hours upon hours reviewing and rating abstracts just for the European Summit so far, and their work is not done. I’d like to thank them for all their support in curating the agenda that we’ve put together. By name, they are:

• Andrew Schofield, Event Streams Chief Architect, IBM
• Joy Gao, Software Engineer, Figma
• Anna McDonald, Principal Technical Account Manager, Confluent
• Loic Divad, Software Engineer, Spotify
• Viktor Gamov, Developer Advocate, Confluent
• Gunnar Morling, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat
• Jun Rao, Co-founder, Confluent
• Lena Hall, Senior Software Engineer and Advocate, Microsoft
• Robin Moffatt, Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent
• Nikki Thean, Staff Engineer, Etsy
• Dave Klein, Developer Advocate, Confluent
• Tim Berglund, Senior Director of Developer Advocacy, Confluent

Register Now