Platform Engineering New York: Kafka-palooza

The Platform Engineering New York (PENY) meetup is back in 2025! PENY is an open and inclusive meetup group, organized by volunteer members of the community, for the community. We welcome all to join and attend these meetups - whether practicing, adjacent to, or interested in platform engineering.

Location

Celonis Inc.
1 World Trade Center 70th Floor
New York, NY 10007

Agenda

6:00pm - 6:30pm: Social time. Food and drinks.
6:30pm - 7:00pm: Announcing the Availability of Lenses Community Edition: Free Forever Enterprise Grade Kafka Tooling
7:00pm - 7:30pm: Kube Your Enthusiasm: Migrating 100+ Services to Kubernetes
7:30pm - 8:00pm: The IDE That Speaks Kafka: Mastering Streams in VS Code

Sponsors

Meetups aren't free. Thank you to our sponsors for providing a platform (pun intended) to make this meetup a reality!

• Lenses

Sponsor Talk: Announcing the Availability of Lenses Community Edition: Free Forever Enterprise Grade Kafka Tooling (Drew Oetzel, Lenses)

Lenses is proud to announce the availability of Lenses 6 Community Edition, a free forever Kafka UI / Dev Portal. Manage 2 clusters of any Kafka flavor. In this talk we will go over how to obtain the free license and basic setup instructions for Docker Compose and Helm Charts. We will also go over some of the more cutting edge use cases this free tool covers with the option for hands-on labs to really see the power of this free tool.

Talk #1: Kube Your Enthusiasm: Migrating 100+ Services to Kubernetes (Ryan Anguiano, WhatIf Media Group)

Migrating over 100 services from Mesos to Kubernetes—without changing a single line of code—may seem daunting, but becomes achievable with the right approach. In this talk, we'll share our journey from a legacy Mesos infrastructure, provisioned when Kubernetes was still in its infancy, to a fully automated and scalable Kubernetes environment.

You'll learn how careful planning, rigorous practice, and disciplined execution allowed us to seamlessly transition our cloud runtime. We’ll dive into the specifics of our system design inspired by the principles of 12-factor applications, including standardized environments, CI/CD practices, and optimized logging through stdout/stderr.

We’ll explore how we standardized our internal communication methods—favoring RESTful APIs and Kafka for synchronous and asynchronous interactions respectively—and how Kafka's flexibility and Avro encoding became central to our asynchronous strategy. Additionally, we’ll discuss the importance of developer-friendly tooling and share how we simplified authentication, configuration management, and logging through easy-to-use utilities and interfaces.

Talk #2: The IDE That Speaks Kafka: Mastering Streams in VS Code (Viktor Gamov)

Apache Kafka has become an essential technology for modern data streaming applications. However, its learning curve can be steep for developers. This presentation will help you overcome the everyday challenges of Kafka development and streamline your development experience using the Confluent VS Code Extension.

We begin by exploring the hurdles developers face when starting with Kafka: grappling with complex concepts, bootstrapping initial code, managing data, and achieving meaningful interaction with their applications. Then, we introduce the game-changing Confluent VS Code Extension - an open-source, free tool designed to transform the Kafka development experience.

Through a practical, live demonstration, we'll follow a new application developer's day and showcase how the extension simplifies everything from environment setup to schema management. You'll see how to rapidly generate and deploy producer and consumer applications, handle schema evolution, debug message validation issues, and manage your development environment effectively without leaving your IDE.

The presentation concludes with real-world implementation strategies, including GitOps integration and multi-environment management. Join the growing community of developers revolutionizing their Kafka development workflow. Start building faster, more intelligently, and reliably with the Confluent VS Code Extension today.

Registration

Registration is required for this event. Please comply with the following requirements otherwise you will be denied entry to the event.

1. Register with your real first name and last name.
2. Bring your ID for verification with security.
3. Your belongings may be scanned by security upon entry.
4. Do not hesitate to RSVP, but if your plans change we would appreciate it if you return to update your RSVP status.

Accessibility

This venue is wheelchair accessible.

Call for Presentations

Do you have a story to share with our community at a future meetup? Please submit a proposal!