Elastic & Kafka in Sydney

Sydney folks, we're back, in partnership with Confluent!

Join us for a night of exploration, knowledge-sharing, and networking!
This event is tailored for tech enthusiasts, professionals, and anyone eager to learn more about Elastic, security, Machine Learning, and more.

Please RSVP if you plan on attending. Registration closes on Monday, November 18th, so we can provide a list of names to building security.

Date & Time:
Thursday, November 21st, from 5:30-8:00 pm AEST

Location:
Elastic Office
60 Margaret St Level 36. Suite 2
Sydney New South Wales NSW

Agenda:
📍 17:30 - 18:20 - Doors open, guests arriving, networking, food

👨🏻‍💻 18:20 - 19:00 - “R” in RAG
Mark Puddick, Senior Principal Search Specialist @ Elastic
Abstract: Information Retrieval: A comparison of traditional lexical search versus semantic search, examining their strengths and limitations. We'll explore scoring mechanisms and the power of hybrid search for blending lexical and semantic approaches to improve retrieval outcomes.

⏰ 19:00 - 19:05 Break

👨🏻‍💻 19:05 - 19:45 - Untangling the Message Web: Distributed Tracing for Kafka-Based Microservices
Chris Arthur, Staff Customer Success Architect @ Confluent
Abstract: Event-driven architectures built on Apache Kafka present unique challenges for observability - message flows are asynchronous, processing can be delayed or retried, and failures can be subtle. This presentation demonstrates how to gain deep visibility into Kafka-based microservices using OpenTelemetry for instrumentation and Elasticsearch for trace analysis.
We'll explore the specific challenges of tracing message-driven systems, including maintaining trace context across topic boundaries, tracking message processing latency, and correlating producer-consumer relationships. Through practical examples, we'll show how to instrument Kafka producers, consumers, and stream processors using OpenTelemetry, and how to effectively store and analyze the resulting traces in Elasticsearch.

🔚 19:45 - 20:00 Wrap up

Elastic Sydney Office is centrally located and is only 1 minute walk from Wynyard Station where there is a hub of transportation.

Invite your friends and join us!

About the speakers:

Chris Arthur is a Staff Customer Success Technical Architect at Confluent. His job involves discussing technical and business challenges with many large organisations, and determining the role that event streaming can play in meeting these challenges. Chris is particularly interested in empowering customers through microservice based event driven architectures