Grafana x Confluent Joint Meetup: Observability, Security & Streaming

Join us for a special joint Meetup of Grafana & Friends, and Confluent!
This session will feature a series of talks centered around observability, and data streaming security.

Agenda.
🕕 18:00 - 18:30 | Arrival & Check-in
Kick off the evening with a warm welcome, and some 🍺 cold drinks!
🕡 18:30 - 18:45 | Welcome & Opening Remarks
Grafana & Friends Frankfurt, & Confluent
🎙️ 18:45 - 19:15 | Talk 1
💣 Migration of Dashboards & Folders to Grafana Unified Search & Storage

• Description: With the next major release (Grafana v13), we are migrating Dashboards and Folders (with more resources to follow) to Grafana Unified Storage. This is part of our journey to improve multi-tenancy in Cloud and transition our APIs into K8s-like resources. In this talk, we cover some architectural changes introduced with Grafana v13 related to our cloud journey to multi-tenancy and what those changes mean for OSS and On-Premise customers today and in the future.
• Speaker: Rafael Paulovic, Senior Software Engineer @ Grafana Labs
• Bio: Rafael Paulovic is a Brazilian expat living in Europe since 2017 and a Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs. He brings experience from leading technology companies, having built critical factory software and AI agents at Tesla and previously served as a Product Owner at SAP.

🎙️ 19:15 - 19:45 | Talk 2
💣 Securing Data in Motion the Right Way

• Description: Data streaming is powering everything from fraud detection to order fulfillment. But as the role of streaming grows, so does the risk — because many streaming platforms, like Apache Kafka, aren’t secure by default. We'll walk through what can go wrong and cover the key pillars of securing a streaming system: encryption, access control, monitoring, and key management. We’ll also look at how observability tools like Grafana help detect anomalies and potential data exfiltration in real time.
• Speaker: Olena Kutsenko, Sr. Developer Advocate @ Confluent
• Bio: Olena is a Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent and a recognized expert in data streaming and analytics. With two decades of experience in software engineering, she has built mission-critical applications, led high-performing teams, and driven large-scale technology adoption at industry leaders like Nokia, HERE Technologies, AWS, and Aiven.
  A passionate advocate for real-time data processing and AI-driven applications, Olena empowers developers and organizations to use the power of streaming data. She is an AWS Community Builder, a dedicated mentor, and a volunteer instructor at a nonprofit tech school, helping to shape the next generation of engineers.
  As an international speaker and thought leader, Olena regularly presents at top global conferences, sharing deep technical insights and hands-on expertise. Whether through her talks, workshops, or content, she is committed to making complex technologies accessible and inspiring innovation in the developer community.

🎙️ 19:45 - 20:15 | Talk 3
💣 Empowering Developers: Meet Confluent for VS Code

• Description: Software engineers spend their days context-switching between IDEs, CLI tools, web consoles, and documentation. Context-switching doesn't just slow you down—it degrades the quality of your work. What if you could interact with your data streaming resources from within your IDE?

In this session, we'll introduce Confluent for VS Code—a powerful extension that brings Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud directly into your development workflow. In a nutshell, you'll learn how to:

• Connect seamlessly to local and remote Kafka clusters, Confluent Cloud, and Confluent Platform environments without leaving your editor
• Explore your data in real-time by browsing topics, consuming messages, and producing test data with schema-aware serialization
• Manage schemas with integrated Schema Registry support for Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema
• Build stream processing applications with Flink and the built-in language server

We'll walk through real-world scenarios—from bootstrapping a new project to troubleshooting production issues—demonstrating how tight IDE integration reduces friction and accelerates development. Whether you're building event-driven microservices, streaming ETL pipelines, or real-time analytics, you'll see how Confluent for VS Code accelerates your development workflow.

• Speaker: Stefan Sprenger, Staff Software Developer I, Confluent
• Bio: Stefan works as a staff software engineer at Confluent. Previously, he co-founded DataCater, a startup in the data streaming space. He has more than ten years of experience in software and data engineering and researched database systems on modern hardware during his PhD studies.