Name: Apache Cassandra® User Group Meetup
Start: 2026-02-18T22:00:00.000Z
Location: NetApp Office - 53rd Floor

Please register for this event [here](https://factorhouse.io/events/sydney-workshop-building-resilient-event-driven-systems-with-kafka-and-flink).

**Go beyond theory and build a production-ready event stream**
Join us for a practitioner-led, hands-on workshop where you'll design, build, and operate a complete real-time operational system from the ground up.

We're teaming up with NetApp Instaclustr and Ververica to run this intensive half-day workshop.

**What You'll Build**
A resilient, real-time operational backbone powered by a Quarkus API, Kafka Streams, Apache Kafka®, and Apache Flink®. You'll implement a stateful order processing and inventory management system that processes live events in real time, the kind of critical infrastructure that powers payment processing, fleet coordination, inventory systems, and customer-facing applications across industries.

**Two Architectural Patterns, One Mission**
You'll implement and contrast two powerful approaches to building event-driven systems:
**\- Pattern 1: Direct Event Publishing**
Build a pipeline where the API writes events directly to Kafka, with a Flink job managing downstream state. Experience the challenges of application-level dual writes in real time.
**\- Pattern 2: Change Data Capture \(CDC\)**
Refactor for resilience by capturing database changes with CDC. Your API simplifies to database-only writes while Flink handles event publishing, demonstrating how CDC decouples applications from event pipelines and creates more robust data flows.

**Operate With Confidence**
Integrate **Kpow** and **Flex** to gain deep visibility into your Kafka and Flink data flows. You'll learn how to make your streaming systems more observable, accessible, and operationally efficient, skills that translate directly to production environments.

**Who Should Attend**
Software and data engineers, platform/SRE teams, and architects adopting streaming and event-driven architectures. Whether you're building payment systems, logistics platforms, or real-time analytics, this workshop gives you practical experience choosing the right patterns for your workloads.

**Please note:** Spots are limited and attendees in engineering roles will be prioritised to ensure an optimal hands-on learning environment.

Sydney Big Data - Converged SQL, NoSQL and Real-Time

Tony G

Sydney Workshop: Building Resilient Event-Driven Systems with Kafka and Flink

NetApp Office - Sydney

Join us for an evening of networking, discussion, and all things Cassandra! Please register for this event [here](https://luma.com/q6kuetpe).

**Agenda:**
​5:00 - 5:45 pm: Pizza / Beer
​​5:45 - 6:15 pm: NetApp, what we do, our role in open source - Mariah McLaughlin, NetApp
​​6:15 - 7:00 pm: Unleashing AI in Cassandra 5 - Ritam Das, NetApp
​​7:00 - 8:00 pm: When “Eventually” Meant 11 ms:
Designing Deterministic Cassandra Architectures in the Telecom Core - Thomas Elliott, Your Augmented Life Advisory Services
​​8:00 - 9:00 pm: Networking

**Speaking Sessions:**

**​NetApp, what we do, our role in open source - Mariah McLaughlin**
​Mariah is a Developer Advocate at NetApp Instaclustr with a focus on developing educational content and building community around Apache Cassandra.
​
She will discuss NetApp Instaclustr’s managed platform and their role as an open source contributor in the Apache Cassandra community

**​Unleashing AI in Cassandra 5 - Ritam Das**
​Ritam Das is a Cloud Solutions Architect at NetApp Instaclustr helping customers consume open-source data platforms like Cassandra, Kafka, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch and more.
​
Ritam will discuss enhancements to Cassandra 5, its AI capabilities, and what it has enabled enterprises to do at scale.
**​**
**When “Eventually” Meant 11 ms:Designing Deterministic Cassandra Architectures in the Telecom Core - Thomas Elliott**
​Thomas Elliott has had a 25-year career in delivering distributed software systems whose work spans early Cassandra OSS deployments in mobile core networks and modern deterministic data foundations for AI. As Head of AI and ML Systems at BioSole International, he focuses on using Cassandra to encode data dependencies that enable reproducible, auditable, and constrained AI reasoning.

​Since the early days of the Cassandra Open Source project, it has been recognized as a critical component in the evolution of telecom infrastructure, particularly mobile core networks. This talk traces how early design constraints shaped architectural decisions in large-scale deployments. It is a story told across three cities in the Persian Gulf, under tight launch timelines, geopolitical complexity, and read-after-write visibility requirements that had an upper limit of 11ms.

NYC Cassandra User Group

Apache Cassandra® User Group Meetup

NetApp Office - 53rd Floor

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