The 10th Apache Kafka meetup

We are excited to announce yet another Apache Kafka meetup, with 3 different speakers. It is an anniversary for the meetup group, with this 10th meetup gathering.

Check the agenda below and RSVP to make sure you get a seat!

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Agenda:
5:30pm: Doors open, registration
6:00pm - 6:30pm: Networking, Food and Drinks
6:30pm - 7:15pm: Running Kafka in Kubernetes: A Practical Guide, by Katherine Stanley (IBM)
7:20pm - 8:00pm: Adding some Rust to your Kafka, by Gerard Klijs (OpenWeb)
8:00pm - 8:45pm: Talking to Kafka, by Bogdan Sucaciu (Axual)

Running Kafka in Kubernetes: A Practical Guide:
The rise of Apache Kafka as the de-facto standard for event streaming has coincided with the rise of Kubernetes for cloud-native applications. While Kubernetes is a great choice for any distributed system, that doesn't mean it is easy to deploy and maintain a Kafka cluster running on it. At IBM we have hands-on experience with running Kafka in Kubernetes and in this session I will share our top tips for a smooth ride. I will show an example deployment of Kafka on Kubernetes and step through the system to explain the common pitfalls and how to avoid them. This will include the Kubernetes objects to use, resource considerations and connecting applications to the cluster. Finally, I will discuss useful Kafka metrics to include in Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes.

Adding some Rust to your Kafka:
Rust is a relatively new programming language promising performance, reliability and productivity. In order to learn Rust Gerard converted a micro service he already wrote in Clojure and Kotlin, both JVM languages, to Rust. The microservice processes two kinds of events, and uses PostgreSQL to keep state. As part of the conversion he wrote a library to use the Confluent Schema Registry with Rust.
What can be said about the promises of Rust compared to the JVM? Gerard will tell about his experiences in using Rust with Kafka, and presenting some benchmarks comparing the different languages. The focus of the benchmarks will be the end to end latency and resource usage. He will conclude with some remarks why it may or may not be a good idea to add some Rust to your Kafka.

Talking to Kafka
Starting with a Coke Vending Machine in 1982, IOT devices are now more popular than ever with more than 7 billion devices connected to the internet. Every device produces a massive amount of data and it can be used to make our life more comfortable, but every device has its own libraries and integrations so it can be quite difficult to acquire the data.
During the presentation. Bogdan will talk about integrating the Google Assistant with Apache Kafka and how you can make your systems to react to voice commands.

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Special thanks to Axual for hosting and sponsoring this event!