Cloud Cost Optimization for developers && Kafka streams from the trenches

We're excited to announce our first meetup in 2024! As usual, we'll take care of food, drinks and awesome sessions - you just need to bring you ;-)

This meetup will feature two talks aimed at (Java) developers:
Pratik Patel will come all the way from Atlanta to kick off, explaining how cloud costs can be reduced for Java applications.

Next, Paul Noorland will take us on a deep dive into Kafka Streams. Teaching us how to make better design decisions during building phase and preventing production issues.

All sessions will be presented in English; RSVP now for an evening of learning and fun!

The meetup will be at the OpenValue office in Utrecht (directions: https://route.openvalue.eu), enough free parking spaces available.

Agenda
17:30 Walk in
18:00 Food
18:30 Talk 1 (see below)
19:30 Break
19:45 Talk 2 (see below)
20:45 Drinks

First talk: Cloud Cost Optimization for Java Developers
Cloud usage has been soaring over the last few years, and now developers are starting to get pressure to reduce cloud spend. In this session, we’ll discuss how to optimize your cloud utilization, and hence how much your team spends, on cloud infrastructure. We’ll discuss these topics with a specific focus on Java applications:

• Architecture of your application
• PaaS, CaaS, Cloud Functions or Kube?
• JVM ramp-up & optimization time
• Headroom for variable load
• Over provision or elastic compute?
• Database and caching techniques

About Pratik
Pratik Patel is a Java Champion and lead developer advocate at Azul Systems. He wrote the first book on 'enterprise Java' in 1996, "Java Database Programming with JDBC" and “Developing Open Cloud Native Microservices”. An all around software and hardware enthusiast with experience in the travel, healthcare, telecom, financial services, and startup sectors. Helps to organize the Atlanta Java User Group, frequent speaker at tech events, and master builder of nachos.

Second talk: Kafka streams: the treacherous undercurrent
Are you an experienced captain on the streams of Kafka? Have you built multiple streaming applications with Kafka streams and do you know the map of the DSL front to back? Then this talk is for you.

Kafka streams is a powerful streaming platform, but powerful streams sometimes have treacherous undercurrents. How do you make sure you and your applications are not pulled under by such an undercurrent, and you navigate your events to a safe port exactly once? This talk will take a look at the inner workings of Kafka streams and lay bare all the vortices, stream rapids and potential dangers. I will discuss the intricacies of the DSL and how it translates to low-level Kafka clients. Then I will discuss six pitfalls to keep an eye on from your periscope, such as what potential (automatic) stateful operations to watch out for and when a join will actually leave you empty handed. This talk will teach you how to navigate the streams of Kafka and make sure your applications stay afloat.

About Paul
Paul is a senior developer and trainer at Yoink in the Netherlands; he is a full stack developer in the JVM ecosystem with a focus on highly scalable back-end systems. He has worked in various fields, such as the energy-, maritime- and banking industry and now is responsible for a high-throughput event-driven solution at a big bank in the Netherlands. Besides programming he is also passionate about acquiring new knowledge and sharing this, for instance with his personally developed Kafka training.