Welcome to Kafka Summit London 2018!

San Francisco. New York. San Francisco again. What is left to do? Why, Kafka Summit London, of course! The Kafka Community’s first Summit on this sceptred isle opens today. Kafka Summit has established itself as the premier streaming systems event for data architects, engineers, DevOps professionals, and developers. It’s a deeply technical, community-focused conference that brings Apache Kafka® practitioners together to share experiences, nail down best practices, and plot the future of streaming technologies. If you’re building streaming systems, you know you’re breaking new ground. You need to hear from your peers and friends who are blazing the same trail.

If you couldn’t make it to London this week, that’s okay: we’ve got you covered! We’ll be live streaming the keynotes both days, so jump on the YouTube live stream to get fresh insights into how to build the next-generation distributed systems you are working on. As usual, we will post recordings of all of the conference sessions after the event, so you can benefit from the educational content even if we didn’t get the pleasure of your company on-site.

We have four keynotes in all—two on Monday afternoon and two on Tuesday morning.

• Confluent co-founder and CEO, Jay Kreps, presents The Death and Rebirth of the Event Driven Architecture
• ThoughtWorks Chief Scientist Martin Fowler and Lead Consultant Toby Clemson give us Enabling Experimentation Using Event-based Systems

• Confluent co-founder and CTO, Neha Narkhede, tells us The Present and Future of the Streaming Platform
• AUDI Head of Development Data Analytics, Stefan Bauer, presents Fast Cars in a Streaming World: Reimagining Transportation at AUDI

For those of you attending Kafka Summit London today and tomorrow, a few things to keep in mind:

• We’re glad you can join us in person!

• Our mobile app is very much worth downloading. You can use it to build your schedule for the day (we know the choices are not easy to make!), interact with other attendees, and to receive real-time updates throughout the day. And please be sure to complete the session rating for each talk you attend—it will help us plan the next European Summit to be even more closely tailored to your needs.

• Do you have Kafka-related questions? We have answers. Stop by the Confluent booth with your hardest questions and get help from our technical experts. The booth will be open both days, so please stop by.

• Arrive early on Monday and get your copy of the Kafka: The Definitive Guide signed by authors Gwen Shapira, Neha Narkhede, and Todd Palino. Signing starts at Monday 10:15.

• Stay late on Monday, and Ben Stopford will be signing his brand new book Designing Event-Driven Systems starting at 18:00.

• Speaking of Monday night: please join us for cocktails on the expo floor starting at 17:45. At 18:45, we’ll move  to the Victoria Suite for food as well. We can’t wait to see you there!

Lest I forget, many thanks to our sponsors. None of this is possible without their support. So, show them some Kafka-community love by visiting their booths during expo hours.

And finally, another thank-you to the Kafka Summit Program Committee for 2018. These folks were indispensable in selecting the talks that make up the London Summit, and are still serving for the San Francisco Summit, whose call for papers will open…soon.