Let us cut to the chase: Kafka Summit London session videos are available! If you were there, you know what a great time it was, and you know that you had to make sometimes-agonizing decisions about which sessions to attend and which to miss. Well, now you can make all those tradeoffs right by watching the whole catalog. And if you weren’t there? Well, dig in and start learning!

It’s always fun to share the numbers from each Summit. This year’s London event was almost double the size of last year, so I’m especially happy to see these numbers on the page:

2 days of Apache Kafka ®

3 keynotes

1,000+ amazing attendees

from 41 countries

56 sessions

72 speakers

20 sponsors

390 companies represented

170+ people trained

1,400 tweets reaching 505K+ accounts

uncountable #streamingselfies

World-class Kafka keynotes

We kicked off the event with some top-flight emceeing (who is that guy?), and a couple of fantastic keynotes:

Neha Narkhede (CTO of Confluent and original co-creator of Apache Kafka) gave us “Event Streaming: Lessons from our Cloud-Native Journey.” She recounted a number of lessons Confluent has learned in building Confluent Cloud, and announced the availability of several new features in the cloud service.

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(CTO of Confluent and original co-creator of Apache Kafka) gave us “Event Streaming: Lessons from our Cloud-Native Journey.” She recounted a number of lessons Confluent has learned in building Confluent Cloud, and announced the availability of several new features in the cloud service. Keith Davidson (Director of Group TV Distribution Platforms, Sky) told us how to “Grow a Great Engineering Culture with Apache Kafka.” We rightly spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to build things, so it was good to step back and see how our engineering work can drive internal cultural change as well.



(Director of Group TV Distribution Platforms, Sky) told us how to “Grow a Great Engineering Culture with Apache Kafka.” We rightly spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to build things, so it was good to step back and see how our engineering work can drive internal cultural change as well. Martin Kleppmann (Researcher, University of Cambridge) asked the rather provocative question, “Is Kafka a Database?” I won’t spoil his rather subtle answer, but I do think everyone left the room persuaded that it is possible to realize ACID transactional properties at scale using Kafka. Vintage Martin!

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Finally, we made an announcement that was near and dear to my own heart: the Confluent Community Catalyst Program is now accepting nominations. If you know someone who had made outstanding contributions to the Confluent or Kafka communities, send us their name! We’ll be announcing the first class at the San Francisco Summit in September.

56 sessions to choose from

With 56 sessions across four tracks—Core Kafka, Event-Driven Development, Stream Processing, and Use Cases (recall that these are available online), here are a few of the highest-rated sessions according to folks who were there:

Of course all learning and no play makes for a dull event streaming community, so we present these images as evidence that we are not, in fact, dull. The afterparty was a great time to spend time with colleagues and meet people you otherwise only see on Twitter:

Some of us, when we yield to the worse angels of our nature, are given to a bit of FOMO. You shouldn’t do this at all, but if telling you that doesn’t help, then the least you can do is get in on the early bird registration for the Kafka Summit San Francisco, which is this Sept. 30–Oct. 1. The agenda will launch very soon, and I think you’ll love it. As always, I hope to see you there!