Melbourne MongoDB User Group #1 2026

Welcome to the first 2026 meetup of Melbourne 🇦🇺 MongoDB User Group.
The team at Mantel Group has kindly offered to host us for the evening at their office in Melbourne on Flinders Street. Complimentary drinks and snacks, as well as some SWAG, will be available, proudly sponsored by the team at MongoDB and Confluent.

We're looking forward to seeing familiar faces and welcoming newcomers!
Please note that we have limited spots this time, so RSVP early. You will not be able to enter the building after 6 PM, so please be on time.

Agenda

• 5:00 pm - Arrival & Networking
• 5:30 pm - Welcome
• 5:35 pm - Talk #1 - Stephen Ermann - Avoid the AI Monolith: Deploy Multi-Agent Systems with MongoDB and Confluent
• 6:00 pm - Talk #2 - Nick Day - The Self-Healing Data Layer: What makes MongoDB and Kubernetes and OpenShift Better Together
• 6:25 pm - Quiz & Swag
• 6:35 pm - Networking & Food

Speakers
Speaker #1 - Stephen Ermann is a Senior Customer Success Technical Architect at Confluent, where he helps large enterprises design and operate mission-critical event streaming platforms with Apache Kafka, Confluent Platform/Cloud and Apache Flink. Based in Australia and working closely with major organisations, he focuses on scalable architectures, secure integrations, and smooth cloud migrations.
Stephen has deep, hands-on experience connecting operational data stores like MongoDB into real-time, event-driven systems—turning CDC streams and transactional data into streaming workloads that power modern applications. He’s passionate about making distributed systems practical, sharing field lessons, and helping teams move from batch to truly real-time data.

Presentation #1 - Avoid the AI monolith and learn how to design event-driven multi-agent systems with Confluent and MongoDB. In this talk, we’ll unpack the shift from classic predictive models to generative and agentic AI, and show why data readiness and real-time context - not just bigger models - determine whether your agents are actually useful in production. You’ll see how treating agents as event-driven microservices with a “brain” helps you avoid brittle point-to-point integrations and instead build scalable, observable systems.
We’ll then walk through how Confluent Cloud, Apache Flink® Streaming Agents, and MongoDB Atlas fit together to provide the streaming backbone, vector search, and RAG capabilities that modern agentic applications need. Using an automated insurance claims demo, we’ll illustrate how real-time embeddings, external tables, and vector search in Flink SQL work with MongoDB Atlas to power context-aware decisions and end-to-end workflow automation. We will also share practical pointers and resources so you can start experimenting with your own multi-agent architectures after the meetup.

Speaker #2 - Nick Day is a Red Hat Architect with specialisation in cloud-native architecture with a passion for delivering large scale highly available platforms for Telco and Enterprise customers. With expertise in Kubernetes and OpenShift, Nick Day helps developers and platform teams build resilient systems that spend more time delivering value and less time in "emergency maintenance" mode.

Presentation #2 - Databases are the heart of applications, managing them at scale shouldn't be intimidating. In this session, we’ll explore how Kubernetes and OpenShift provide a "high-availability safety net" for MongoDB. We’ll dive into the mechanics of self-healing, automated storage and automated scaling, and why the "Better Together" story benefits Availability, the Platform and the Database teams.

Thanks,
The Melbourne MUG Team!