IN-PERSON: Apache Kafka® x Apache Flink® Meetup

Join us for an Apache Kafka® x Apache Flink® meetup on Monday, April 7th from 6:00pm hosted by REWE!

📍Venue:
Europlaza, Building 4, Stair 5, 5th floor
Am Europlatz 2, 1120 Vienna
Take the elevator at staircase 5 to the 5th floor

🗓 Agenda:

• 6:00pm - 6:30pm: Welcome/Networking
• 6:30pm - 7:15pm: Mohamed Hammad & Zoltan Lamer, REWE
• 7:15pm - 7:45pm: Olena Kutsenko, Staff Developer Advocate, Confluent
• 7:45pm - 8:30pm: David Moravek, Software Engineer II, Confluent
• 8:30pm - 9:00pm: Additional Q&A, Snacks/Drinks and Networking

💡 Speaker One:
Mohamed Hammad & Zoltan Lamer, REWE

Title of Talk:
From Developer to DevOps: How a REWE Integration Platform was built

Abstract:
Apache Kafka powers REWE’s event-driven architecture, handling millions of daily transactions across logistics, finance, inventory, and customer loyalty. This talk explores how Kafka enables real-time data flow, transforming REWE’s operations from batch processing to a scalable, resilient ecosystem. "know what is happening when it happens"
We’ll cover two perspectives:

• Developers: Kafka’s role in integrating microservices for low-latency order processing, stock updates, and financial transactions.
• Platform Engineers: Operating Kafka at scale—replication, monitoring, and fault tolerance in a cloud-native environment (Aiven for Apache Kafka).

Through real-world use cases, including REWE’s jö loyalty program and cross-market data migration, we’ll share practical insights on optimizing Kafka in high-volume retail. Whether you're a developer or DevOps engineer, this session offers a hands-on look at running Kafka at scale.

Bio:
Mohamed Hammad is a Senior DevOps Engineer at REWE Group, specializing in Kafka operations, event-driven architecture, and large-scale cloud deployments. With over 10 years of experience in backend engineering, he has worked across industries including retail, e-customs, and banking, leveraging technologies like Spring Boot, kafka and Kubernetes.

Currently, Mohamed architects and maintains REWE’s Kafka ecosystem on Aiven, manages schema registries, Istio service mesh, and custom Kafka operators on Kubernetes. Passionate about event-driven systems, he continuously explores how Kafka can power scalable, resilient, and decoupled services in enterprise environments.

💡Speaker Two:
Olena Kutsenko, Staff Developer Advocate, Confluent

Title of Talk:
Building agentic systems with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink

Abstract:
AI-powered agent systems are becoming essential for automation, personalization, and real-time decision-making. But how do we ensure that these agents can process information continuously, maintain context, and provide intelligent responses at scale?

This talk explores how Apache Kafka and Apache Flink can be used to build dynamic real-time agent systems. We'll start with the basics of agent-based systems - how they work, how they communicate, and how they retrieve and generate relevant knowledge using Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Then, we'll look into real-time streaming architectures, showing how Kafka handles message passing between agents and Flink processes events to track context and enable intelligent responses.

By the end of this session, you'll have a clear roadmap for designing AI-driven agent systems that are context-aware, efficient and work with a continuous stream of data.

Whether you're working on chatbots, monitoring systems, or intelligent automation, this talk will provide practical insights into bridging streaming data with generative AI to power the next generation of autonomous agents. Perfect for beginners and experts alike, this session offers valuable insights for all skill levels.

Bio:
Olena is passionate about data and its applications, sustainable software development, and teamwork. With a background in computer science, she's led teams and developed mission-critical applications at Nokia, HERE Technologies, and AWS. Currently, she works at Aiven where she supports developers and customers in using open-source data technologies such as Apache Kafka, ClickHouse, and OpenSearch. She is also an AWS Community Builder, a volunteer teacher at non-profit tech school and an international public speaker, who regularly present at conferences around the world.

💡Speaker Three:
David Moravek, Staff Software Engineer II, Confluent

Title of Talk:
Introduction to Apache Flink®

Abstract:
In today's world, being able to process data in real-time is crucial for many industries. Apache Flink has grown to be a key player, known for its efficiency and reliability in stream processing. It's now seen as a standard tool, giving developers and engineers strong support for handling large data streams. This talk will give you a detailed look at what makes Apache Flink successful. We'll cover its approach to handling continuous data streams, how it manages data safely, and stays working even when things go wrong. We'll dive into features like being able to adjust to the amount of data coming in and sorting data based on when it actually happened. We'll also share how Flink has evolved over time and talk about a new product we've made using Flink for Confluent Cloud. This product shows off how flexible and powerful Flink can be for real-world tasks. This session is designed for anyone who's interested in stream processing, whether you're just starting out or looking to deepen your knowledge of Apache Flink. We're here to guide you through using this powerful tool to create advanced, real-time data processing systems that can handle big challenges.

Bio:
David is a Principal Engineer at Confluent and Co-Founder of Immerok, a company dedicated to Apache Flink, which Confluent acquired to advance stream processing technology. With over ten years of experience, he has worked on designing large-scale data pipelines, diving into database internals, and building strong engineering teams. Currently, he focuses on improving Flink Runtime to meet the demands of cloud providers at a regional scale. Additionally, David is actively involved in the development of SlateDB, a modern LSM-tree based embedded database designed for object stores, which aims to become a key cloud primitive in the modern application stack. David is also an Apache Beam and Apache Flink committer.

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DISCLAIMER
NOTE: We are unable to cater for any attendees under the age of 21.
If you would like to speak or host our next event please let us know! community@confluent.io