Elastic Warsaw User Group

Address: Brain Embassy Warsaw, Tadeusza Czackiego 15/17, Warszawa

Agenda:
18:00 Doors open
18:05 Drinks, bites and networking
18:30 Securing data in motion the right way
19:15 From Edge to Gateway: architecting your OpenTelemetry Collector deployment
20:00 Wrap up

Talks:
Securing data in motion the right way
Data streaming is powering everything from fraud detection and real-time analytics to patient monitoring and order fulfillment. But as the role of streaming grows, so does the risk - because many streaming platforms, like Apache Kafka, aren't secure by default.

In this talk, we’ll take a practical look at data streaming security through the lens of Kafka, one of the most widely adopted streaming platforms in the world. We'll walk through what can go wrong - real examples of exposing 14M patient-doctor messages, or years of real-time delivery info to the internet - and what it takes to do it right.

We'll cover the key pillars of securing a streaming system: encryption in transit and at rest, access control, monitoring, and key management. Along the way, we’ll look at the trade-offs like disk encryption vs. end-to-end encryption, what is behind field-level and envelope encryption, and the realities of using customer-managed keys in regulated industries.

We’ll also explore how monitoring extends beyond Kafka itself—into downstream systems like Elasticsearch—where logs, events, and even sensitive data are often indexed, creating both powerful detection capabilities and new security risks if left unprotected.

If you're building, running, or scaling streaming systems, this talk will help you see the security blind spots and give you concrete steps to protect the data flowing through your pipelines.

Speaker: Olena Kutsenko, Developer Advocate, Confluent

From Edge to Gateway: architecting your OpenTelemetry Collector deployment
As OpenTelemetry adoption scales, the Collector quickly becomes your observability backbone. But deploying it effectively means answering two critical questions: what exactly should you deploy, and where should it run?

In this session, we will explore the complete lifecycle of a Collector fleet. We will start by demystifying the binaries, comparing standard distributions, vendor-optimized flavors like EDOT, and custom builds using the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder (OCB).

From there, we will map out core deployment topologies—from edge agents to centralized gateways—highlighting the architectural trade-offs of each pattern. Finally, we will tackle the reality of managing these complex fleets at scale, tracing the evolution from static configurations and operators to dynamic, centralized orchestration using OpAMP.

Speaker: Marcin Stożek, Principal Product Manager, Elastic