Name: IN PERSON: Apache Kafka® Meetup
Start: 2025-04-08T17:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-04-08T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Target Plaza Commons - Nicollet Room

Hello Streamers!

Please join us for an Apache Kafka® meetup hosted and sponsored by our friends at Target on Tuesday evening, April 8th from 5:00pm!

📍**Venue:**
Target Plaza Commons
1001 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, MN 55403

***IMPORTANT:***

* ***FOR SECURITY PURPOSES ONLY, YOUR FIRST/LAST NAME (as listed on your government issued ID) & EMAIL WILL BE COLLECTED.***
* **IF YOU RSVP HERE, YOU DON'T HAVE TO RSVP @ Saint Paul Apache Kafka® Meetup by Confluent.**

🗓 **Agenda:**

* 🕠 **5:00 PM** – Doors open/Welcome
* 🍻 **5:30 PM** \- Pizza\, Drinks and Networking
* 🎤 **6:00PM** – Sandon Jacobs, Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent
* 🎤 **6:45 PM** – Sharmila Devarajan, Target & Mike Muske, Target
🍻 **7:30 PM** – Additional Q&A & Networking
* 🚪 **8:00 PM** – Event ends

💡 **Speaker One:**
Sandon Jacobs, Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent

**Title of Talk:**
Previewing KIP-932 - Queues for Kafka

**Abstract:**
Apache KafkaⓇ has achieved great success as a highly scalable event-streaming platform. Consumer groups assign partitions to members of the group, providing a powerful combination of ordering and scalability. But how can we scale the consumers in a group beyond the number of partitions of a topic?

Enter KIP-932 - aka “Queues for Kafka” - enabling multiple consumers in the group to process from the same topic-partition. In this session we’ll explore how shared groups provide better support for transactional workloads, load balancing, and event ordering, all while leveraging Kafka’s scalability and durability features. We’ll discuss how shared groups differ from classic consumer groups and when to use them. What better way to do this than actually looking at code? Let’s do that.

Shared groups make Kafka an even stronger alternative to traditional message brokers. Kafka veterans and beginners alike will find this session of interest, prompting you to rethink event processing.

💡 **Speaker Two:**
Sharmila Devarajan, Target

**Title of Talk:**
Journey of Kafka Platform Automation at Target

**Abstract:**
Managing Kafka at scale can be complex, time-consuming, and prone to human error. At Target, Kafka operations initially required significant manual effort. Provisioning, scaling, and configuration management were hands-on tasks that demanded constant attention. To enhance reliability and efficiency, automation became a top priority.

In this talk, Sharmila will share how her team tackled the challenge of automating Kafka, the strategies they implemented for configuration management, provisioning, monitoring, and the impact automation has had on reliability and developer productivity.
Whether you’re working with Kafka, other distributed systems, or looking to streamline operations, this session will provide valuable insights into building scalable and resilient automation frameworks.

**Bio:**
Sharmila Devarajan has over 15 years of experience in software engineering, specializing in building scalable and distributed backend systems. She is currently a Lead Engineer on the Cloud and Compute team at Target, where she manages the Kafka platform. With expertise in technologies like Kafka, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch, she focuses on building resilient, high-performance systems. Passionate about JVM technologies, she has a particular love for Kotlin and its modern, expressive design. Sharmila thrives on solving complex engineering challenges and driving automation to streamline operations.

💡 **Speaker Three:**
Mike Muske, Target

**Title of Talk:**
JSON Schemas for Kafka: Adoption Without Disruption

**Abstract:**
Apache Kafka is the backbone of asynchronous communication in many microservice architectures, often working alongside synchronous HTTP APIs. While OpenAPI specs have long provided structure for HTTP-based communication, Kafka topics often lack equivalent schema governance - leading to challenges in analytics, data quality, and long-term maintainability. As organizations shift schema ownership left - to the teams producing the data - many face a major hurdle: how to introduce JSON Schemas for existing JSON Kafka topics without disrupting production workloads. At Target, we tackled this challenge at scale, enabling JSON Schema definitions for tens of thousands of existing JSON Kafka topics - without modifying topic data or requiring changes to client applications.In this talk, Mike will explore:
\- The benefits of a schema registry and JSON Schemas for Kafka topics
\- JSON Schema evolution with meaningful compatibility
\- Target’s approach\, including inferred schemas\, endorsed schemas\, and data quality sampling

\*\*\*
DISCLAIMER
We are unable to cater for any attendees under the age of 18.
If you want to host/speak at a future meetup, please email community@confluent.io

Alice Richardson

Twin Cities Apache Kafka® Meetup by Confluent

Confluent

Technology

Apache

Open Source

Big Data

Stream Processing

Apache Kafka

IN PERSON: Apache Kafka® Meetup

Target Plaza Commons - Nicollet Room 

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Twin Cities Apache Kafka® Meetup by Confluent

IN PERSON: Apache Kafka® Meetup

Twin Cities Apache Kafka® Meetup by Confluent

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