Kafka Summit APAC 2021 Recap

The second of this year’s three online Kafka Summits is now complete! We hope you were able to join us for Kafka Summit APAC 2021 yesterday. We had over 13,000 registrations from over 5,200 companies and 106 different countries across the globe. Let’s look at what we talked about at this summit.

Jun Rao, an original co-creator of Apache Kafka^® and one of the co-founders of Confluent, opened up the day with a keynote. If you want to know what has been going on with Kafka as a project and as a technology ecosystem, and what is in the future for Kafka, this was the talk for you. He covered some of Kafka’s history, beginning as a simple distributed log, then growing data integration and stream processing features over time. He pointed us to a future where Kafka runs commonly as a cloud-native service in the form of Confluent Cloud, with features like infinite storage and multi-region capability. It really is nice to put all this history in one place, and coming from a guy who’s been there from the beginning, his thoughts about where data in motion is taking us next are thoughts we should take the time to learn.

Bank BRI Agro told us about how they have built an entire business out of automated, asynchronously interacting services connected through Kafka topics. They have a loan disbursement process that involves no humans in the loop, and still manages to obtain ISO20000 certification and deliver a 0.6% rate of non-performing loans. Jay talked about this kind of thing at the 2019 San Francisco Summit, and it’s really cool to see it put into practice.

If you live or travel in Southeast Asia, then you definitely know what Grab is: the regional super app, offering everything from ride sharing to food delivery to package delivery to payments to video streaming. Grab operates in eight countries and over 400 cities as of this writing. A platform this successful presents a significant opportunity for fraud, which means an even greater opportunity for real-time fraud detection. Check out the keynote by Grab’s Wui Foo about how Apache Kafka impacts that effort, including integrations with external systems, connections between internal components, and the ubiquitous move to the cloud.

Leng Be is the head of MEGA, a group at National Australia Bank (NAB) that handles messaging infrastructure. Nation-scale banks have to have very conservative processes for rolling out new technologies, but that didn’t stop NAB from making some aggressive migrations to Kafka in a careful, methodical manner. Watch Leng’s talk to hear the story of how they started small and went big with their adoption of Kafka.

And of course, it wasn’t just the keynotes! Here are just a few of the sessions you might want to check out:

• The Log of All Logs: Raft-based Consensus Inside Kafka, in which Confluent’s own Guozhang Wang tells us about the keystone feature of KIP-500 from the ground up.
• Mistakes – I’ve Made a Few. Blunders in Event-driven Architecture, where Simon Aubury of Thoughtworks teaches us how not to do things from his extensive experience building event-driven systems.
• Event & Data Mesh as a Service: Industrializing Microservices in the Enterprise, by Platformatory’s Pavan Keshavamurthy. Data mesh is an increasingly important concept in the event-driven world, and you should understand it.
• Building a Streaming Pipeline on Kubernetes using Kafka Connect, KSQLDB & Apache Pinot, in which Luan Moreno Medeiros Maciel of Pythian and Mateus Oliveira of One Way Solution provide a roadmap for combining real-time data pipelines and a real-time analytics backend.

If Kafka Summit APAC wasn’t at a convenient time for you, don’t forget that Kafka Summit Americas is coming up next on September 14th–15th. Sign up as soon as you can! Americas will be the third and final Summit for the year, so you won’t want to miss it!

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