Kafka, Samza and HBase at the Home Office / Kafka as a Service on IBM's Bluemix

Building on the success of our last meetup, we are please to announce the next Unified Log London meetup, with two great talks, from the Home Office and IBM:

Implementing multi-DC transaction-free consistency at the Home Office with Kafka, Samza and HBase

Pete Hannam will share his experiences working with the UK Home Office (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/home-office) on a Shared Data Platform to provide a single, scalable and extensible platform for persisting and accessing data across Home Office programmes.

To meet the project requirements, the team needed a way to implement at-least-once processing, without any duplicated data, when processing data from a both a 'legacy estate' and operational systems. In this talk Pete will discuss how they leveraged event sourcing with Kafka, Samza and HBase to develop a solution that delivers both a high throughput and semi-strong consistency.

Offering Apache Kafka as a service in the public cloud

What does it take to offer Apache Kafka as a service in a public cloud? Oliver Deakin from the IBM Bluemix team will introduce us to IBM Message Hub (https://developer.ibm.com/messaging/message-hub/), a cloud service based on Kafka running in IBM's Bluemix PaaS.

Kafka was designed for use in the data center, so what did IBM have to do to offer and operate it as a cloud service? What does Kafka in the cloud look like for users and operators? And how well do the key attributes of Kafka translate into a cloud service? In this talk, Oliver will dig into how Message Hub started with Kafka and built a multi-tenant cloud service, and some of the extensions the IBM team has built on top of and around Kafka to exploit its strengths.