Folks, THIS is Apache Kafka

Abstract
On day one of Green Bay Packers’ training camp each season, legendary coach Vince Lombardi stood before his team holding a “pigskin” and said: “Gentlemen, THIS is a football.” This highlights the importance of the basic fundamentals of any subject. In an ecosystem like Apache Kafka, it’s imperative that we understand the pieces and parts that compose this “highly scalable event streaming platform.” In this session, let’s (re)introduce ourselves to the components of Apache Kafka. We’ll start with terminology like topics, partitions, producers and consumers - basic “blocking and tackling.” Along the way we’ll delve into how each is related and significant to the others. We’ll also take a high-level look at “special teams” aspects of the Apache Kafka ecosystem for data governance, connecting to external systems, and event processing. I’m no Vince Lombardi. But you’ll walk away from this session with a basic understanding of how Kafka does what it does, as well as a curiosity to explore Kafka as a useful and powerful tool in your application architecture.

Speaker Bio
Sandon Jacobs is a Senior Developer Advocate at Confluent - the enterprise event-streaming platform pioneer - where he works to create content to “meet developers where they are” in their event-streaming journey. Prior to Confluent, he worked as an engineer and architect at SAS Institute, NBCUniversal, Digital Turbine/Appia, Railinc, Duke Health, BCBSNC, and others - building microservices and streaming data pipelines to perform at high-scale. Having worked with Apache Kafka since its “incubation” with the ASF, he has seen the event-streaming space evolve as the demand for near real-time processing and analytics has come to the forefront in many industries. He has built microservices with multiple JVM languages - Java, Scala, Kotlin, Groovy - and also worked in the devops space with tools like Terraform, Helm, and Ansible.

Schedule
6:00 - Meet & Eat
6:30 - Announcements, Jobs exchange
6:45 - Presentation
7:45 - Conclusion