New York Apache Flink Meetup

Hello everyone! Join us for a joint meetup with Elastic on June 25th from 5:30pm!

Agenda:

• 5:30 pm: Doors open; say hi and eat some food
• 6:00 pm: “12 Levels of Search — Easy to Complex”, by Jon Avezbaki, Developer Advocate at Elastic
• 6:30 pm: Q&A with Jon
• 6:40 pm: "One Does Not Simply Query a Stream", by Viktor Gamov, Principal Developer Advocate at Confluent
• 7:10 pm: Q&A with Viktor
• 7:20 - 7:30 pm: Networking and event wrap-up

"One Does Not Simply Query a Stream"
Streaming data with Apache Kafka® has become the backbone of modern applications. While streams are ideal for continuous data flow, they lack built-in querying capabilities. Unlike databases with indexed lookups, Kafka’s append-only logs are designed for high-throughput processing—not for on-demand queries. This necessitates additional infrastructure to query streaming data effectively. Traditional approaches replicate stream data into external stores: relational databases like PostgreSQL for operational queries, object storage like S3 accessed via Flink, Spark, or Trino for analytics, and Elasticsearch for full-text search and log analytics. Each serves a purpose—but they also introduce silos, schema mismatches, freshness issues, and complex ETL pipelines that increase system fragility. In this session, we’ll explore solutions that aim to unify operational, analytical, and search workloads across real-time data. We'll demonstrate stream processing with Kafka Streams, Apache Flink®, and SQL engines; real-time analytics with Apache Pinot®; search capabilities with Elasticsearch; and modern lakehouse approaches using Apache Iceberg® with Tableflow to represent Kafka topics as queryable tables. While there's no one-size-fits-all solution, understanding the tools
and trade-offs will help you design more robust and flexible architectures.

Bio:
Viktor Gamov is a Principal Developer Advocate at Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®. With a rich background in implementing and advocating for distributed systems and cloud-native architectures, Viktor excels in open-source technologies. He is passionate about assisting architects, developers, and operators in crafting systems that are not only low in latency and scalable but also highly available.
As a Java Champion and an esteemed speaker, Viktor is known for his insightful presentations at top industry events like JavaOne, Devoxx, Kafka Summit, and QCon. His expertise spans distributed systems, real-time data streaming, JVM, and DevOps.
Viktor has co-authored "Enterprise Web Development" from O'Reilly and "Apache Kafka® in Action" from Manning.
Follow Viktor on X - @gamussa to stay updated with Viktor's latest thoughts on technology, his gym and food adventures, and insights into open-source and developer advocacy.

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Abstracts:
“ 12 Levels of Search — Easy to Complex ”
You can’t learn calculus without arithmetic. Search is no different. In this talk, we’ll go over a full, high-level overview of search engineering. We’ll start with the basics, and then make our way through more intermediate and advanced topics, like RAG and agentic memory. This is not a talk that will dive into any one area of search in great detail. Rather, it aims to provide a birds-eye prespective of the field so that we can begin to understand what topics and best practices we may be lacking in our understanding. These potentially unexplored avenues can significantly benefit our search and AI systems by expanding our technological toolkit.

Bio:
Jon worked for 8 years as a software engineer in the finance and traffic engineering industries before pivoting to developer advocacy at Elastic. He now empowers developers through education, outreach, and community engagement.

Where: Elastic NYC Office
1250 Broadway, Floor 16, Training Room
New York, NY 10001

When: June 2nd | Doors open at 5:30 PM
If you’re a long-time Elastic user or just starting your journey, this is the perfect opportunity to share ideas, meet new people, and get inspired. See you there!