Neha Narkhede is co-founder and CTO at Confluent, a company backing the popular Apache Kafka messaging system. Prior to founding Confluent, Neha led streams infrastructure at LinkedIn, where she was responsible for LinkedIn’s streaming infrastructure built on top of Apache Kafka and Apache Samza. She is one of the initial authors of Apache Kafka and a committer and PMC member on the project.

Agenda

Neha will cover a five-step adoption journey we observe organisations going through as they build streaming systems.

First, the organisation becomes aware of streaming as an architectural paradigm and builds a pilot system. After that pilot succeeds, streaming goes live with the first production system.

Third, the small production system spreads to an mission-critical application. Fourth, as the organisation gains competence with the new platform and comes to depend more and more on the advantages conferred by a streaming platform, that mission-critical application is expanded to a global use case, where streaming data is produced and consumed across geographies.

Finally, the organisation learns that a streaming platform is the proper core on which to layer all of its applications and services, and the “central nervous system” metaphor of comprehensive streaming adoption finally becomes true. Streaming adoption, having begun with an idea and a pilot project, has finally transformed a business and its entire information architecture.