Meet the people building real-time systems.
Tech talks, conferences, and meetups where you can learn how platform teams run Apache Kafka, Flink, and Iceberg in production.
Upcoming
Reduce Kafka spend and operational risk: practical techniques for cluster consolidation
Karel Sague, Staff Software Engineer at Factor House, walks through a practical methodology for cutting Kafka costs by consolidating, splitting, and migrating clusters without downtime or data loss.
Migrating to open source Kafka: cutting TCO without the operational burden
Chad Harris (Factor House) and Justin George (NetApp Instaclustr) walk through moving from Confluent or Amazon MSK to open source Kafka, and how to avoid the operational burden.
Kafka User Group - Europe
A free online session for Kafka practitioners across Europe. Each session opens with a lightning talk from a community member, followed by open group discussion.
New at Factor House: September 2026
See what's new in Factor House's products this month: live demos of recent capabilities, the thinking behind them, and what's coming next, with time to ask your own questions.
Kafka User Group - Americas (October 2026)
A free online session for Kafka practitioners on October 28. Sessions open with a lightning talk from a community member, then group discussion — share what you're building and connect with peers.
Kafka User Group - Asia Pacific (October 2026)
A free online session for Kafka practitioners in Asia Pacific on October 28. Sessions open with a lightning talk, then group discussion to share what you're building and connect with peers.
Past events
Apache Kafka Meetup - Melbourne - August 2026
Join us for an Apache Kafka x Apache Flink meetup in Melbourne, with talks on streaming Kafka into Apache Iceberg and on Kafka, Flink, and GenAI, followed by networking.
Journey to an open lakehouse: real-world lessons from streaming Kafka into Apache Iceberg
Karel Sague, Staff Software Engineer at Factor House, shares real-world lessons streaming Kafka into Apache Iceberg with Kafka Connect, and the schema and partitioning challenges involved.
Kafka User Group - Americas (July 2026)
A free online session for Kafka practitioners on July 29. Sessions open with a lightning talk from a community member, then group discussion — share what you're building and connect with peers.
Kafka User Group - Asia Pacific (July 2026)
A free online session for Kafka practitioners in Asia Pacific on July 29. Sessions open with a lightning talk, then group discussion to share what you're building and connect with peers.
Things that go bump in the night: Kafka ops
Chad Harris, Solutions Architect at Factor House, walks through real-world Kafka operational failures and the debugging workflows that actually help when the system stops behaving the way you expect.