IN-PERSON: Apache Kafka® x Apache Flink® Meetup

Join us for an Apache Kafka® x Apache Flink® meetup on Wednesday February 25th from 6:00pm in Dublin hosted by Autodesk!

📍Venue:
Autodesk
1 Windmill Lane, 2nd Floor, Dublin D02 F206

PLEASE BRING A FORM OF VALID ID AND REGISTER WITH YOUR DETAILS FOR SECURITY PURPOSES/BUILDING ACCESS. THANK YOU!

🗓 Agenda:

• 6:00pm: Doors open
• 6:00pm – 6:30pm: Food, Drinks & Networking
• 6:30pm - 7:15pm: John Byrne, Sr. Manager, Partner Applied Solutions, Confluent
• 7:15pm - 8:00pm: Rishayah Kumar Trivedi, Senior DevOps/SRE Engineer, Autodesk & Douglas Hobson, Principal DevOps/SRE Engineer, Autodesk
• 8:00pm - 9:00pm: Additional Q&A and Networking

💡 First Speaker:
John Byrne, Sr. Manager, Partner Applied Solutions, Confluent

Title of Talk:
Flink State: Design Choices You Can’t Undo (on Confluent Cloud)

Abstract:
A practical look at how state behaves when running Flink on Confluent Cloud, the early design decisions teams often underestimate (keyed state, TTLs, upgrades, reprocessing), and the kinds of problems that only show up months later.

Bio:
John Byrne is a Sr. Manager, Partner Applied Solutions at Confluent, the company founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®. With a strong background in data engineering, John previously worked for Slice, Registers of Scotland, and Sopra Steria, where he specialized in event streaming, ETLs, and data governance. Passionate about GIS, mapping, and ETL processes, he has delivered talks at FOSS4G and developed production-grade ETL projects incorporating spatial data and mapping technologies.

In his spare time, John enjoys playing golf and coaching his local youth rugby team.

💡 Second Speakers:
Rishayah Kumar Trivedi, Senior DevOps/SRE Engineer, Autodesk & Douglas Hobson, Principal DevOps/SRE Engineer, Autodesk

Title of Talk:
To Production and Platform: Our Kafka Journey, DR Strategy, and Kafka-as-a-Service

Abstract:
In various organisations, multiple teams have historically had to build Kafka the hard way, spending months on security hardening, compliance validation, observability, and disaster recovery, often repeating the same work with inconsistent outcomes. The result is slow onboarding, duplicated effort, and operational silos that don’t scale as more streaming use cases come online. In this talk, we walk through our Kafka production journey on AWS MSK: how we began with a POC, what it really takes to make Kafka production-ready, and the key platform decisions we had to take to standardise the architecture and operations.

We’ll then dive into disaster recovery for streaming applications where the hard problems aren’t just infrastructure failover, but event continuity and restoring pipelines under pressure. We’ll share our HA DR approach for Kafka-backed systems, including an active/passive regional strategy, and practical failover/failback considerations to minimise RPO/RTO. Finally, we’ll close with our Kafka-as-a-Service (KaaS) vision for Autodesk teams: self-service, policy-driven deployments and service tiers that let internal teams onboard in hours instead of months so the product teams can focus on building streaming features, while the platform provides consistent guardrails for security, reliability, and recoverability. Attendees will leave with a checklist of production-ready requirements for Kafka, a clear mental model for DR in streaming systems and a set of platform patterns for evolving towards Kafka-as-a-Service.

Bios:
Rishayah Kumar Trivedi (Senior DevOps/SRE Engineer, Autodesk)
Rishayah is a Senior DevOps/SRE engineer at Autodesk's data streaming and processing platform team with 9+ years of experience building scalable cloud infrastructure and automating enterprise deployments. He holds industry-recognised credentials in AWS, Kubernetes, and DevOps, and has led many initiatives improving reliability, performance, and security through Shift-left approach, IaC and CI/CD best practices.

Douglas Hobson (Principal DevOps/SRE Engineer, Autodesk)
Douglas is an accomplished Principal Devops/SRE engineer in Autodesk's data streaming and processing platform team with extensive experience in cloud architecture, infrastructure automation, and systems reliability. With a proven track record at various firms, he has led global teams in building scalable, secure, and high-performing cloud environments. Skilled in AWS, IaC, and distributed systems, Douglas is recognised for his technical leadership, problem-solving expertise, and commitment to operational excellence.
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DISCLAIMER
We are unable to cater for any attendees under the age of 18.
If you would like to speak or host our next event please let us know! community@confluent.io