What to expect from Current 2024
It takes a certain reserved assuredness to name your company’s annual convention without using the name of the organisation anywhere in the title, tagline or the trailing promotional materials.
Rather like the Beatles’ White Album, it perhaps speaks of a team that has reached a certain level.
Confluent simply refers to Current as the ‘next generation of Kafka Summit’ and the event is staged from September 17-18, 2024 at the Austin Convention Center, Texas.
Confluent is a data streaming platform that enables users to stream, connect, process and govern data as continuous, real-time streams.
No-burden Kafka
Founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka, Confluent expands open source Kafka with enterprise-grade features. The company says it removes the burden of Kafka management or monitoring.
Focused on real-time applications, real-time data and real-time pipelines that pump the lifeblood into event-driven architectures, this event centres on developer and data engineering use cases for Kafka and Flink. Oh… and there will be plenty of AI too, but that goes without saying these days.
Apache Kafka & Apache Flink
As TechTarget explains, Apache Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system that receives data from disparate source systems and makes the data available to target systems in real-time.
“Kafka is written in Scala and Java and is often associated with real-time event stream processing for big data. Like other message broker systems, Kafka facilitates the asynchronous data exchange between processes, applications and servers. Unlike other messaging systems, however, Kafka has very low overheads because it does not track consumer behaviour and delete messages that have been read,” notes the above TechTarget link.
As detailed here by Eric Avidon, “Apache Flink is a data processing framework for data streaming, a compute layer that enables enterprises to filter, combine and enrich data in real time to enable real-time analysis and decision-making.”
Similar platforms include Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Azure Event Hubs and Confluent’s own proprietary platform. [Because the company offers] Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink, a dedicated managed service for Apache Flink, Confluent is enabling customers to use Confluent’s overall Kafka-based streaming data platform in conjunction with the open source compute layer preferred by many enterprises.
Who should attend Current?
Confluent says that this event is for data practitioners (developers, architects, operators) and leaders who are driving data applications within their organisations.
Co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps’ keynote is entitled How the Data Streaming Platform Shapes Tomorrow’s Businesses. Kreps says he will reveal the next game-changing evolution of data infrastructure and explain how leaders in financial services, media and automotive industries are harnessing the Confluent’s Data Streaming Platform and Data Products to revolutionise their operations.
“Current is the event to attend to learn everything you need to know about events, eventing, and event-driven architectures. You’ll see proof of that in the packed, two-day agenda. With nearly 100 sessions––breakouts, lightning talks, meetups, and more—covering topics from message broker basics and the history of SQL to implementing real-time systems with Kafka and Flink and deep dives into vector databases, there’s something for everyone at this conference,” blogged Confluent staff developer advocate Danica Fine in a show preview post.
Fine says that she loves seeing how real people are using data streaming technologies to solve real problems. As such, she highlights Dean Scha
Co-founder & CEO Jay Kreps’: How A Data Streaming Platform Shapes Tomorrow’s Businesses.
efer’s session, ‘Tracking Locomotive to Train Associations in Kafka,’ where he’ll showcase how Kafka is being used, cover common hurdles that all Kafka-based applications are at risk of running into, and how to avoid them.
“Confluent’s own David Anderson always seems to be able to unpack some pearls within Apache Flink. At Current he’ll do that again in his session ‘Flinking Enrichment: Shouldn’t This Be Easier?’
David will teach us the most useful techniques for implementing stream enrichment with Flink, along with common pitfalls and coping strategies for those pitfalls,” said Sandon Jacobs, developer advocate at Confluent.
On the second day of the conference, Jacobs and Fine say that the keynote is all about the developer… er, data scientist … or is it the data engineer? Spoiler alert: it’s all of those right?
The event is planned for an in-person event plus a limited virtual experience for those who cannot join in person. The virtual experience will include the keynote program and limited breakout sessions.
