Twin Cities Apache Kafka® Meetup by Confluent

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Zoom meeting will start just before 6p.
If you're interested in sharing content for this or a future event, please message Jesse Lang!
We have a special treat for April: a joint meetup with Twin Cities Apache Kafka® Meetup!

Join us for "Embedding a Stream Processor Inside Your Go Application", presented by Riley Belgrave, Staff Software Engineer at WarpStream. Riley will be presenting in-person.
Stream processing typically means deploying and managing additional infrastructure — Flink clusters, Kafka Streams apps, or standalone workers. But what if you could embed a full stream processor directly inside your existing Go binary?

In this talk, I'll show how WarpStream embeds Bento — an open-source, MIT-licensed stream processor with 90+ connectors — as a Go library inside its stateless Kafka-compatible agents. Instead of asking customers to deploy separate stream processing infrastructure, WarpStream runs Bento pipelines directly inside the broker itself as "Managed Data Pipelines."
We'll cover:

• Using Bento's public Go API to build and run stream processors programmatically
• Bloblang, Bento's purpose-built data mapping language, and how WarpStream uses it to transform data as Kafka topics are materialized into Apache Iceberg tables via Tableflow
• Managing pipeline lifecycle with a Kubernetes-style reconciliation loop — diffing desired vs. observed state and converging automatically
• Distributing pipeline instances across a fleet of stateless agents without a central coordinator
• Sandboxing user-provided pipeline configurations so they can't access the host's filesystem or environment variables — critical when running in customer cloud accounts

Everything demonstrated uses Bento's open-source API, so you'll leave with practical knowledge you can apply to embed stream processing in your own Go applications today.

About Riley:
Riley Belgrave’s journey in technology began in 2005 with their first Ubuntu CD and a struggle to exit Vim, igniting a passion for learning technologies like Openstack, AWS EC2, Mesos, Docker, and Kubernetes. In 2016, they joined Target to build their Cloud Application platform. Later, at Optum, they developed a Cluster as a Service for Cassandra, Kafka, and Elasticsearch, managing thousands of clusters with over 12PB of data. In late 2024, they joined Confluent to expand their WarpStream zero-disk Kafka product. They also maintain a homelab to continue learning outside of work.

Agenda

• 5:30pm - 6pm: Networking, food & drink, and announcements
• 6pm - 7:15pm: Embedding a Stream Processor Inside Your Go Application - Riley Belgrave
• 7:15pm - 7:30pm - Open Discussion

Located at SPS Tower. 333 S 7th St, Minneapolis, MN 55402
From street level, go up the escalator to the skyway level and take the elevator bank to the 8th floor.

While the skyway is open until 8p, the outside street level doors and the elevators are restricted at 6p. If you arrive after that, please text 612-568-8380 and someone will come down to let you in. Thanks for your patience.
Interested in sharing at an upcoming meetup? We'd love to hear what you have to share! Contact the meetup organizers to get the ball rolling!
Public Safety Guidelines

Please reference current CDC guidelines for public gatherings and health self-assessments before attending in-person. Our main concern is to protect everyone and maintain the safety of everyone visiting our office. If you have any questions or concerns with our recommendations, don’t hesitate to contact us. We also provide a virtual option, via Zoom, for those uncomfortable attending in-person.
https://www.meetup.com/golangmn/members/?op=leaders
If anyone has any problems or questions, feel free to text or call:

• Jesse Lang - 612-568-8380
• Corwin Diamond - 612-210-5798