Kafka Summit London 2023: Life Hacks, Best Moments!

💥 What’s New This Month in Kafka Report

• Last week, Rich and I joined about 1500 event driven enthusiasts in attending Kafka Summit London 2023. Thanks to all of you who came and found our stand, as well as those of you who supported us from abroad. 

• We’ll launch this Kafka Report issue with a quick recap of Kafka Summit London 2023.

🏆Jay Kreps’s Keynote Address 

• A definite highlight of Kafka Summit London 2023 was hearing Jay talk about how Kafka is growing increasingly critical to top companies. As AI models grow more important to chatbot training, fraud prevention, and customer analytics, executives want access to real-time streaming data. 

• If your other projects and tasks took you far away from Kafka Summit London 2023 this year, or you just weren’t able to make it to the opening event, here’s the YouTube recording of Jay’s keynote: Beyond Speed: Kafka Summit London 2023 Keynote. 

🍎+ 🍊Apples and Oranges: Comparing Kafka Streams and Flink 

• This session was standing-room only as we listened to Bill Bejeck discuss Kafka Streams and Flink’s relative merits and trade-offs. As Bill explained, the technology you use depends on your organisation’s specific use case and the skill level of your DevOps engineers or consultants. Chat with us to get a checklist. 

• Building on his talk: Here’s an interesting article, written by a contributor to Flink, that touches on the drivers behind the recent resurgence of interest in Flink—even though the software has been around for over a decade: Five Drivers Behind the Rapid Rise of Apache Flink. 

☀️ Overall Impressions 

• Here’s my short blog debrief (Looking Back at Kafka Summit London 2023) and the corresponding Confluent write-up (Kafka Summit 2023 Recap). 

🔥Proving Kafka’s Utility to Senior Leadership 

• Also at Kafka Summit London 2023, executives told us that they care most about the use cases and benefits associated with Kafka—not necessarily deep-dive technical explanations of how to implement Kafka technology. 

• To show how a proof of concept project can help you prove Kafka’s utility to senior leadership, we just released a case study (Dufry strengthens its case for a Kafka architecture with an Apache Kafka proof of concept).

• As an add-on, if you’re in the situation of convincing your company to introduce real-time data streaming, check out How to Sell Your Ideas Up the Chain of Command | Harvard Business Review. 

💥 Confluent Platform 7.4 

• At Kafka Summit, Jay Kreps also introduced the most recent version of Confluent Platform. Released on May 4, 2023, Confluent Platform 7.4 includes three major updates and features: 

1. Production-ready KRaft: Confluent now directly manages metadata rather than relying on a third-party integration or software. Curious about why they decided to drop ZooKeeper? Read Why Apache Kafka is Dropping ZooKeeper for KRaft.  

2. Improved data quality rules: Teams can validate and constrain data more easily, improving the overall trustworthiness and accuracy of Confluent Platform streaming data. (For the complete breakdown, read Streaming Data Quality, Integration, and Sharing.) 

3. Confluent for Kubernetes Blueprints: Teams can speed up production time with Confluent’s self-service control plane. Review the quick CFK Blueprints installation guide to get this feature up and running. 

☀️ Deploying Confluent Platform 7.4 

• If you’d like to investigate the new version before you deploy it, here’s the Confluent Platform 7.4 Release Notes. 

• Then, once you’re ready for the next step, you can download the 7.4 version of Confluent Platform, which gives you options for both cloud and self-managed deployment: Get Started – Launch Kafka in Minutes. 

🌿New Courses – Integrating Kafka With Flink 

• Time to upskill—Flink looks like it’s around to stay for the near future 🙂 The following two courses are broken up into increments of 5- to 6-minute videos, code snippets, short written posts, and hands-on exercises. 

✔️Course: Apache Flink® 101: 

• A two- to three-hour course that covers stream processing with Flink and its common use cases, from fraud detection to analytics. You should know SQL and Kafka, but it lets you start from square one with Flink. 

• Why it’s great: Multiple hands-on exercises that include using the Flink Web UI, deploying an ETL pipeline, and more. Thanks go out to David Anderson, Software Practice Lead at Confluent, for producing quality content. 🙌

☀️Course: Building Apache Flink® Apps in Java

• This one also assumes that you’re new to Flink and takes two to three hours to complete, but it’s based in Java. You’ll learn how to get from batch Java to real-time data processing. 

• Why it’s great: Allows Java experts to add another notch to their belt and offers quick, practical exercises in creating Flink data sources and transforming data. Thank you, Wade Waldron.

💥EXTRA: Flink GitHub Guide! 

• For more advanced users: If you’ve already played around with Flink and want to get more efficient, this GitHub guide provides learning resources and a whole lot of community links → GitHub/Apache-Flink-Guide. 

🤝 London Kafka Meetup 

• At Kafka Summit London, we realised there was a TON of interest from FTSE 100 companies that wanted to host and speak at our next Kafka Meetup London. 

• As you might remember, OSO hosted the London Kafka Meetups in person in January and April. Last month, we focused on Kafka streams in fintech. 

• Now, we’re scheduling the next London Kafka Meetup for June. Join our Meetup and pages to find out the location, timing, and date! 

🌿 New Use Cases 

• Stay tuned for finance use cases on replacing batch with real-time—we’ll be releasing one in June—and reach out to Rich or me if you’re contemplating a Kafka project, have exciting news to share, or have thoughts about the Summit. 

• And don’t forget: Come join us for the next London Kafka Meetup! 🎉