Apache Cassandra® New York Metro Area User Group

​5 - 5:45: Pizza / Beer

​5:45 - 6:15: Future of Cassandra® based GenAI with IBM watsonx

​6:15 - 7:00: ACID Transactions with Apache Cassandra - Aaron Ploetz

​7:00 - 8:00: Performance Improvements & Upgrade Challenges: Bloomberg’s Road to Apache Cassandra 5.0 - Andres Beck-Ruiz and William Nguyen

​8:00 - 9:00: Networking

SWAG giveaways for all attendees who register via this link:
https://www.ibm.com/events/reg/flow/ibm/XCCJNGMB/landing/page/landing

​New York Metro Area's User Group for Apache Cassandra® is dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone. Our anti-harassment policy can be found at here.

​Talk Descriptions

​Future of Cassandra® based GenAI with IBM Watsonx

​With the acquisition of DataStax, the leading provider of Apache Cassandra® based solutions, IBM is demonstrating it commitment to the future of this critical Apache project. We'll help the community understand how this drives the IBM Watsonx platform and GenAI strategy.

​Performance Improvements & Upgrade Challenges: Bloomberg’s Road to Apache Cassandra 5.0

​At Bloomberg, many of our Apache Cassandra use cases demand low latency and high throughput. Over the past year, we have started deploying Cassandra 5.0 to achieve our performance objectives. In this talk, we’ll discuss how we introduced Cassandra 5.0 within Bloomberg, the new features we are using, and the substantial performance improvements that have been delivered.

​ACID Transactions with Apache Cassandra

​Join us for an introduction to the next big feature in Apache Cassandra® - ACID transactions! Watch as these operational concepts come to life with a real-time game of "DataStaxOpoly," (our tech twist on the classic board game) and you'll see how each property purchase and rent payment becomes a real-world example of a multi-partition, ACID-compliant financial transaction across a distributed system. Whether you're a developer or an architect, this session will give you a practical understanding of distributed ACID transactions coming in the next release of Cassandra.

​Speaker Bio's

​Aaron Ploetz

​Aaron Ploetz is a Developer Advocate for IBM. He has previously led database engineering teams for startups and Fortune 50 enterprises. Aaron has been recognized as a Cassandra MVP (2014-2017), a Cassandra Catalyst (2023), and a committer on the Apache Cassandra® project. Aaron has also authored a few books, including "Mastering Apache Cassandra 3.x" in 2018.

​Andrés Beck-Ruiz

​Andrés Beck-Ruiz is a Software Engineer on Bloomberg's NoSQL Infrastructure Engineering team. In his time on the team, he has focused on integrating Reaper with Bloomberg's Apache Cassandra infrastructure and has also contributed to the Reaper open source project.

​William Nguyen

​William Nguyen is a Software Engineer on Bloomberg's NoSQL Infrastructure Engineering team, where he builds and operates the company's managed Apache Cassandra service for various internal application teams. Of late, he has been focused on evolving Bloomberg’s Cassandra infrastructure to embrace cloud-native methodologies.