What to Look Forward to at Kafka Summit APAC

Kafka Summit, now in its sixth year, is coming to Asia-Pacific! After launching in the U.S. in 2016 and in Europe in 2018, Kafka Summit APAC will feature speakers and attendees from across the region with a time zone-friendly schedule, with the event taking place in Singapore Time (SGT). Naturally, the Asia-Pacific region and time zone-friendly concepts are at odds since there are eleven time zones. But hey, it beats waking up for North America scheduling!

The first Kafka Summit APAC will be held on July 27 and 28.

Although, as I am fond of saying, nature is clearly healing, it is still the right thing for us to pursue a virtual format for this year, and so we are. You get at least one more year of trading off networking and a real podium for not having to pay for travel or enduring the jetlag.

Another first for Kafka Summit, the keynotes, breakout sessions, and lightning talks will be subtitled into Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin.

The event offers a schedule of sessions spanning industries and subjects and kicks off with keynotes from Singapore-based superapp Grab, Indonesian bank BRI-Agro, National Australia Bank, and Confluent co-founder Jun Rao. A strong financial services focus includes the following talks: An Event-sourcing Core Banking Platform from Petyo Pachunchev of Project Imagine; Scaling a Core Banking Engine Using Apache Kafka from ThoughtMachines’ Peter Dudbridge; and Use ksqlDB to Migrate Core-banking Processing From Batch to Streaming from yours truly.

I am also looking forward to listening to Kahn Chen from Tencent—the world’s largest video game vendor; as well as fintech Airwallex’s Anshuman Mukherjee on Better CQRS with ksqlDB. Another standout speaker is Bhavesh Raheja from Disney+ Hotstar, the dominant video streaming platform in India.

Interest in both stream processing and microservices remains strong with featured talks from Brolly, Tesco, and Pythian. I am also keen to hear about the intersection of Blockchain and Kafka – A Modern Love Story by Suhavi Sandhu from Guidewire Software.

Stay tuned as other activities are being planned, including Ask the Experts sessions where your questions on a range of subjects will be answered over a live chat, as well as training and workshops on July 27.

Over the years, and spread as far as Auckland to Mumbai, enthusiastic Kafkateers have gathered regularly at Meetups to talk about stream processing and setting data in motion. Countless pizzas, T-shirts, and little sticker piles have been laid out with care; while software engineers have been humbled by projectors behaving badly; as much a meetup tradition as the pizzas. Not to mention navigating some of the worst rush-hour traffic jams. Today, a number of the largest Kafka user groups are in APAC, including Bangalore, Seoul, and Singapore. Kafka Summit APAC 2021 is just beginning—we look forward to hearing about how Kafka is used across Australia, New Zealand, and Asia-Pacific in July and for years to come.

We hope you will join us and the Kafka Community—register today for Kafka Summit APAC!

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