What to expect from Current 2023

What is Confluent?

To remind ourselves, Confluent was built by the original creators of Apache Kafka and is a data streaming platform that operates at full-scale i.e. it is built to power enterprise-grade features functions for users to access, store and manage data as continuous real-time streams. Since then Confluent has acquired Immerok and added Apache Flink, the real-time stream processing whizz to its toolbox. We can also expect more news on Flink at the conference.

Put simply, Confluent is designed to remove the burden of Kafka management and monitoring.

As TechTarget reminds us, Apache Kafka (which is written in Scala and Java) 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.

Confluent details its platform technology proposition by saying that it provides a cloud-native experience, completing Kafka with a holistic set of enterprise-grade features. Underpinning the platform is a 99.99% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) and the company talks about what it calls ‘committer-driven expertise’ behind its support and services.

The Confluent team is reported to have over one million hours of technical experience with Kafka.

“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 overhead because it does not track consumer behaviour and delete messages that have been read,” notes TechTarget.

Essentially background exposition and clarification out of the way then, what should we expect from Current 2023?

Current 2023

The company answers its own question and asks – who should attend Current 2023? That would be data practitioners (by which Confluent means developers, architects and operations team players) and leaders who are the driving forces data applications within their organisations

Some 2500+ data streaming enthusiasts are expected to attend this second annual event. The company is planning the entire programme as 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 one track of sessions.

“Dive into architectures, technologies, use cases and trends. View the big picture and debate the finer points at the only event that brings the data streaming community all together in real time. Choose from more than 75 forward-thinking sessions on the best and most innovative use cases revolutionising data streaming,” notes Confluent, in its event promotional materials.

Brand new heavies

The company is upbeat about the speaker selection at the event and says that ‘some heavies’ will be on site talking and sharing. The team asks us to ‘kick back and connect’ with thought leaders, movers and shakers, analysts (they forget press, oh well) and star practitioners in data streaming.

Featured speakers include Tim Berglund, VP developer relations at StarTree; Amy Chen, partner engineering manager at dbt Labs; Stephan Ewen, founder & CEO at Restate; Hojjat Jafarpour, CEO of DeltaStream; Frank Munz, principal TM engineer at Databricks; Justine Olshan, software engineer at Confluent; Marta Paes, head of developer experience at Materialize; Matthias Sax, sSoftware engineer at Confluent; Sherin Thomas, staff software engineer and Jark Wu, Flink SQL lead at Alibaba.

Keynote speakers will be led by Confluent co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps.

The event itself will be held at the San Jose Civic from September 26-27 and Confluent Tweets at @confluentinc