Two Talks: DSE Graph & Event Streaming with Kinesis

We've got another two exciting talks for you this month!

Event driven architectures with Amazon Kinesis | Mark Harrison and Justin Potter

In this talk Mark and Justin will discuss Weight Watcher's journey moving from tightly coupled REST based microservices, to an event driven architecture using Amazon Kinesis. This talk will cover the problems with the previous architecture and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of decoupling microservices using an event stream, specifically Kinesis. This presentation will also cover the (soon to be open sourced) Kinesis driver that was written using Scala and Akka to provide a more reliable and easier to work with producer and consumer compared to the raw Amazon drivers. The presentation will also touch on why Kinesis rather than Kafka, and what constraints that introduces.

Bios

Mark Harrison is a senior consultant for Cake Solutions, based in Manhattan. He has over over 10 years commercial experience and has been developing reactive and distributed applications using the Lightbend stack for over 5 years. Mark is also a Datastax certified Cassandra architect.

Justin Potter is a passionate Scala developer and distributed systems engineer. He started his Scala journey at Gawker Media Group and has since moved on to work for Weight Watchers Inc., where he's currently contributing to a re-architecture into a reactive stream based system.

DSE Graph | Sebastián Estévez

DSE Graph is brand new and folks are still trying to understand where it fits in the broader landscape. Sebastián will discuss the concepts and help to provide that understanding of this exciting new feature. He will also talk about the performance characteristics and use cases of DSE Graph, and how it can benefit your next application!

Bio:

Sebastián Estévez is passionate about distributed systems, specifically in production environments. After being a consultat at IBM for five years, he joined the DataStax startup program where he provided consulting and support for hundreds of Startups deploying DataStax Enterprise. He is now a Solutions Engineer in the NorthEast helping enterprise customers embark on new DSE deployments.