​Agenda​

​5:00 - 5:30: Pizza / Beer

​​5:30- 6:00: From Zero to Streaming: Deploying a Real-Time Data Pipeline with Kafka and ClickHouse

​6:00 - 6:30: Configure & Operate C* Clusters with Claude

​6:30 - 7:15: How Cassandra 6 Will Change Your Life with Patrick McFadin

​7:15 - 8:30 Networking

​Session Overviews / Bios

​From Zero to Streaming: Deploying a Real-Time Data Pipeline with Kafka and ClickHouse

​Walt Ribeiro

​In this session, he'll walk through deploying a production-ready streaming pipeline - Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, and ClickHouse - entirely through Terraform using infrastructure as code. We'll skip the slides and go straight to the terminal: a live demo showing data flowing in real time.

​Configure & Operate C* Clusters with Claude

​James Colvin

​Join us as we stand up a production-style Apache Cassandra cluster on Amazon EKS with the k8ssandra-operator, then put modern AI tooling to work operating it. We'll trace the path from the bad old days of hand-edited YAML through Kubernetes operators to the current frontier: managing a live database cluster through Claude with MCP servers and Skills.

​Along the way, you'll see how a domain-specific MCP server gives an AI model real-time visibility into a running cluster, and how Claude Code Skills turn your existing runbooks into procedures the agent can follow on demand. Expect live demos, a few surprises, and a practical sense of how MCP and Skills fit together to change how we operate databases.

​How Cassandra 6 Will Change Your Life

​Patrick McFadin

​​Cassandra 6 is not just another database release. It introduces major changes that will affect how teams upgrade, repair, monitor, automate, and reason about Cassandra clusters in production. Don't be surprised when you go to update!

​This session will focus on the operational changes Cassandra users need to understand before adopting Cassandra 6. We’ll cover Transactional Cluster Metadata and the new Cluster Metadata Service, Accord-based ACID transactions, built-in Auto Repair, JDK 21 and Generational ZGC, topology and snitch changes, JMX configuration updates, compaction improvements, guardrails, and new observability features.

​The goal of this talk is practical: what changes for operators, which runbooks need to be updated, what automation may need to be revisited, and how Cassandra 6 moves the project toward safer, more coordinated, more self-managing operations.