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 0, 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 Real-Time Kafka Visualisation in Grafana

In this talk, we’ll introduce the Kafka Data Source plugin we developed for Grafana, which enables users to query and visualise Kafka topic data directly in their dashboards—without the need for intermediate storage or external services. We'll share how the idea came about, how we collaborated with the Grafana community and developers to bring it to life, and the challenges we faced along the way. We'll also discuss our vision for the plugin’s future and its role in the evolving observability landscape.

🎙️Hamed Karbasi, Senior Data Engineer @ 0+X
Hamed is a data engineer at 0+X, focused on large-scale distributed systems and data pipelines. Most recently at Snapp!, he scaled the event-driven infrastructure, redesigned the data warehouse, and optimized pipelines for greater availability and scalability. A passionate open-source contributor, he actively works on Grafana and Kubernetes on GitHub, and shares insights via Medium and YouTube.

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 👋