Zopa and Centrica Connected Homes talk Kafka

Join us for an Apache Kafka meetup on May 31st from 6:00pm - 9:00pm, hosted by Zopa in Barcelona. The address, agenda and speaker information can be found below. See you there!

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Agenda:
6:00pm: Doors open
6:00pm - 6:30pm: Pizza, Drinks and Networking
6:30pm - 7:30pm: Adrian MacCague, Zopa
7:30pm - 8:30pm - Josep Casals, Centrica Connected Homes
8:30pm - 9:00pm - Additional Q&A & Networking

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Speaker 1:
Adrian MacCague, Software Engineer, Zopa

Bio:
Adrian has experience developing software across the mobile, desktop and server platforms. Prior to working on Zopa's origination pipeline, he developed the HideMyAss! OS X Consumer VPN client. He is passionate about delivering software that does the right thing with respect to the user and applying best in breed technologies to the problem in hand."

Title:
The Road to Success with Kafka Streams (Adrian thinks he will need around 35mins for the presentation and then most likely 10-15mins for questions)

Adrian will discuss why Zopa chose to adopt Kafka and the success they have had with it so far. Kafka Streams was a major part of this journey, but with great power and flexibility comes easy to fall into pitfalls when building a (sometimes) stateful microservice architecture. He will attempt to guide new and existing developers to Kafka Streams down the road of success.

Abstract:
Zopa was the world’s first peer-to-peer consumer lending platform. Now we’re taking on a new challenge: building a next-generation bank in the UK.

As a company that’s been around for more than thirteen years, Zopa’s C#/MS-SQL/Windows-only tech stack has been maturing alongside the business success throughout. With the decision to launch a bank in the UK, we made a commitment to transition towards becoming a polyglot shop adding Java and Python to our stack, adopted Docker with Kubernetes, while diversifying on tech, people and locations. This transition is all about helping us tackle one of the biggest challenges mature companies face: breaking up the monolith.

We’ve made an important call to break away from our sole dependency on a relational database, and added Kafka as our distributed log platform as the glue between all microservices. This has enabled some strong architectural decisions around stream processing, asynchronous design, and reactive event processing. To complement our stack, we’re using key-value Redis clusters to handle the low latency and high throughput data access use cases in various pockets of the system.

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Speaker 2:
Josep Casals
Head of Data and Analytics, Centrica Connected Homes

Bio:
Josep Casals is a creative architect and hands-on IT engineer. He likes to design lead and implement systems from first principles. His specialities are: Smart Contracts, Advanced system architectures, Big Data, Internet of Things, Containers, Machine Learning, Technical Lead, CTO and Startup. He is also Organiser of the London Apache Kafka Meetup Teacher at the London School of Economics MISDI CodeCamp.

Title:
Real-time Analytics and Machine Learning with Kafka Streams and Kubernetes

Abstract:
Centrica Connected Home is one of the largest connected home providers in the UK. It sells the Hive brand of products which include smart lights, sensors and plugs in addition to its Active Heating system. We build real-time analytics and machine learning solutions for our customers using Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect and Spark. Kafka is the backbone of our real-time analytics, and machine learning platform and our applications are deployed on Kubernetes. We want to present our use of Kafka Streams to build analytics and machine learning solutions and running Kafka Streams on Kubernetes. The talk would go over our reasons for picking Kafka Streams as our preferred streaming solution, experiences with other streaming frameworks, the scalability and reliability Kafka Streams provides us and the kind of problems we solve for our customers.

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