Colleague Niek Jacobsen visits Kafka Summit 2022 in London

Apache Kafka is the industry-standard event streaming platform, originally developed by LinkedIn and later made available as an Apache open-source product.

The Kafka Summit is organised by Confluent, the original developers of Apache Kafka.

What made the conference worthwhile for me?

• The best practices that are shared
• The customer stories that are shared.
• The outlook on the future of event streaming technologies. 

The opening keynote was delivered by Ben Stopford, Lead Technologist at Confluent and author of the book “Designing event-driven systems”.

Next up was Jay Krepps, CEO of Confluent. He brought Avi Perez from Wix onto the stage, and together they discussed how Wix uses Kafka as the backbone for their infrastructure that powers 7% of all global websites. 

Takeaways on day 1 

On the first day, I was particularly struck by a number of inventive use cases of Kafka. I learned that Airbnb uses Kafka to support their build & deployment pipeline. Kris Jenkins from Confluent showcased in his own flamboyant way how he implemented a Text-Based Adventure game in Kafka. 

A hot topic this year was the Confluent Schema Registry. Although Kafka allows for loosely-coupled integrations between different systems, both systems are still bound by the agreed format of the messages they exchange. For example, if the publisher of the messages suddenly changes the format of the messages being sent, the subscriber will no longer be able to interpret and process those messages.

The message schema describes the format of the exchanged messages. That is why Confluent developed the Schema Registry, a component that stores schemas and dynamically addresses both the publisher and the subscriber to know what the agreed format of the exchanged messages should be. 

Takeaways on day 2 

On the second day, I was particularly looking forward to the session by Kai Waehner, technology evangelist at Confluent. That man has been producing a large amount of online content for years, from articles to blog posts and presentations, both on his personal blog and on the sites of Confluent and others.

The session did not disappoint: he managed to cover 75 slides of best practices, customer cases, and reference architectures in 45 minutes, undoubtedly winning the award for the most words per minute during the conference. 

Also, the sessions by Robin Moffatt, Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent, on Kafka as an ecosystem, and Thomas Heinrichs from Camunda on communication patterns in modern architectures stuck with me. 

Finally, the session by Colin McCabe, Principal Engineer at Confluent, was also valuable, where he explained as a true developer with a coffee in hand, how Kafka will decrease its dependency on Zookeeper and replace it with Kraft in the future. 

Thus colleague Niek Jacobsen returned to Belgium after two exciting days with plenty of inspiration and new insights, ready to guide our clients in their integration and Kafka journeys. 

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