Name: IN-PERSON: AI, Observability, and Data Streaming
Start: 2025-09-11T16:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-09-11T18:00:00-07:00
Location: AWS Portland

**IMPORTANT PLEASE RSVP @ [https://luma.com/hqd8qs4x?tk=jGmq3d](https://luma.com/hqd8qs4x?tk=jGmq3d)**

​**Session 1: Accelerating AI-Powered Applications to Production: Building IDPs to Amplify Developer Velocity**
​AI-empowered developers are shipping applications faster than ever but infrastructure is still the bottleneck. While developers can now generate entire application features in minutes using AI tools, provisioning the cloud infrastructure to run those applications often takes days or weeks. How can platform teams build Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) that match the velocity of AI-powered development?

​In this talk, I'll share how to design IDPs specifically optimized for AI-empowered application developers who need to move from idea to production at unprecedented speed. We'll explore how the five essential IDP components: abstractions, blueprints, workflows, security guardrails, and self-service all must evolve to support the new reality of AI-accelerated development cycles.
​**Speaker: Eron Wright, Software Engineer at Pulumi**

​**Session 2: Beyond the Black Box: Gaining Observability into AI-Powered Applications with Amazon Bedrock**
​Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Nova model enables you to build AI powered applications and when they are running in production, this can encounter errors or even simply a better visibility into how the model is performing is important. In this session, we will look at why monitoring is the key for AI applications and when using Bedrock with applications, how AI monitoring gives you insights not only about errors but also AI model performance.
​**Speaker: Jones Zachariah Noel N, Sr Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic**

**​Session 3: The art of structuring real-time data streams into actionable insights**
​Real-time data is fast, messy, and often unpredictable - making it hard to use effectively. To unlock its full potential, we need to turn raw streams into clean, structured data that's ready for analysis and AI. In this talk, we’ll show how Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, and Apache Iceberg work together to tame real-time data and prepare it for advanced use cases.
We’ll start by showing how Kafka handles high-throughput data ingestion and how Flink processes and transforms these streams in real time. You’ll learn how to use Flink to clean and structure data on the fly, making it ready for storage and querying. Then, we’ll explore how Apache Iceberg stores this data in an efficient, queryable format - paving the way for analytics, dashboards, and ML pipelines.

We’ll also introduce the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and demonstrate how it enables a large language model (LLM) to “talk” to your data - making it possible to ask questions in natural language through a chatbot interface. While this technology is still evolving, it's a major step toward reducing friction in accessing critical business insights.

Using three live demos - based on IoT sensors, social media streams, and product orders - we’ll walk through how to build a real-time data pipeline from raw input to structured output. By the end of the session, you’ll have a clear blueprint for managing real-time data effectively and preparing it for AI and analytics use cases. Whether you’re just getting started or already building modern data pipelines, this talk will give you practical tools and ideas you can use right away.
**​Speaker: Travis Hoffman, Senior Executive Advisor at Confluent**

**​Session 4: Good vibes only**
​AI tools excel at writing code and documentation, but they're not perfect, and trusting their output without verification can create unexpected challenges. You'll learn practical strategies for working with AI assistants while staying in control of your development process and will walk away with a framework for embracing AI-powered development without sacrificing the critical thinking that makes you an effective developer.
**​Speaker: Danielle Heberling, AWS Serverless Hero**

\*\*\*
DISCLAIMER
No catering for those under age of 21.
If you want to speak at or host a meetup, please email [community@confluent.io](http://community@confluent.io/)

Alice Richardson

Portland Apache Kafka® Meetup by Confluent

Confluent

Technology

Open Source

Big Data

Stream Processing

Apache Kafka

Maher Hawash

Ted Willke

Travis

Jiang Kai

Sonny

Vincent Yau

Martin Zajac

IN-PERSON: AI, Observability, and Data Streaming

AWS Portland

Share

Portland Apache Kafka® Meetup by Confluent

IN-PERSON: AI, Observability, and Data Streaming

Portland Apache Kafka® Meetup by Confluent

Details

Sponsors

Members are also interested in