Grafana & Friends 🤝 Apache Kafka®

We're thrilled to invite you to our next meetup, a joint event with the Barcelona Apache Kafka® community hosted at Factorial 💥

📍Location: Factorial (NEW office) - Carrer de Llacuna 56, edificio C, planta 2, Barcelona | https://maps.app.goo.gl/baTqk9H8m3ACK4jD7

📕 Agenda
18:30 Arrival and Check-in 👋
18:45 Talks start 🗣️
20:00 Food, Drinks, and networking 🍕🍻

1️⃣ Supercharging Grafana with Community Plugins by Imma Valls, Staff Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs

Grafana is powerful on its own, but its true potential lies in its vibrant community of plugin developers. In this talk, we'll delve into how community plugins extend Grafana's core functionality, enabling you to connect to a broader range of data sources and visualize your data in new and innovative ways. We'll introduce the Kafka Data Source plugin as a practical example, demonstrating how it enables you to directly query and visualize Kafka topic data in your dashboards, thereby bypassing the need for intermediate storage or external services.

2️⃣ Building on the Shoulders of Giants: How Cloud Primitives and Hyperscalers Simplify Distributed Storage by Dani Torramilans, Staff Engineer II at Warpstream.

Distributed databases have always been hard to build. Today, cloud primitives such as durable object storage and single-digit millisecond key-value stores are reshaping that landscape. By abstracting away many of the hardest problems in distributed systems, they enable simpler, more maintainable implementations. This shift is driving the rise of Kafka-on-S3 systems and data lake query engines.
In this session, we’ll look at WarpStream, a petabyte-scale Kafka replacement built entirely on cloud primitives, and see how Grafana leverages it to scale its observability platform. Together, we’ll explore:
Core concepts of building databases with a clean separation of storage and compute, and how cloud primitives make advanced features easier to deliver and operate.
WarpStream’s design: stateless, diskless agents for the data plane and stateless, multi-tenant instances for the control plane, with zero dependency on local disks.
Trade-offs between traditional disk-based systems, such as Kafka and Elasticsearch, and cloud-native databases, with a focus on performance, latency, and cost.
How cloud-native design accelerates features such as multi-region deployments and integrated data warehousing.
A real-world use case: how Grafana uses WarpStream to simplify operations and achieve greater scalability.

See you there 👋