Open Source Data Happy Hour: Kafka Beyond The Disk & AI Runs on Infra
Open Source Data Happy Hour: Kafka Beyond The Disk & AI Runs on Infra
Enjoy afterwork drinks and practical discussions on Apache Kafka, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL and much more. Enjoy a session designed for data engineers, architects and technical decisions-makers like you, who want to address the challenges they face in data-infrastructure. No high-level pitches but straight into practical discussions on how to build scalable, efficient open sourced-powered data platforms.
⚡️ Agenda
On the menu, we have happy hour drinks & snacks, two deep-diving tech talks from Aiven (builders' insights from our own engineers) , and relaxed time to connect with your local open source community.
Detailed schedule shared closer to the event.
⚡️ Tech Talks
AI Runs on Infra: Engineering a Data Platform Worth Trusting (Dilip Saha, VP, Platform Engineering at Aiven)
AI initiatives rarely fail because of weak models—they fail because the infrastructure is brittle. As organizations move from experimentation to production, the focus shifts from “Can we build it?” to “Can we trust it, scale it, and afford it?” In this talk, Dilip Saha provides an insider’s look at Aiven’s Trust Architecture, a platform evolution designed for the demanding workloads of the AI era, drawing on a decade of experience operating open-source technologies like PostgreSQL, Kafka, and OpenSearch.
We’ll explore the core pillars of a modern, sovereign AI stack: Zero-Trust Sovereignty through BYOC and BYOK to ensure data and intellectual property remain within your control; on-demand infrastructure with 15-second startup and scale-to-zero capabilities to match developer velocity; and Recursive Intelligence, where Aiven builds with AI using intelligent observability and self-healing systems to deliver 99.99% uptime.
Finally, we’ll examine how embedded FinOps brings real-time cost visibility, transforming AI cost anxiety into automated economic clarity—offering a practical roadmap for CTOs and engineers to build cloud-agnostic, resilient, and inherently trustworthy data platforms.
Beyond The Disk: The Future with Aiven for Apache Kafka® (Josep Prat, Senior Engineering Director, Streaming Services at Aiven)
Apache Kafka® has spent the last 14 years becoming the backbone of real-time data, trusted by over 80% of the Fortune 100. But as data volumes explode, the traditional model of keeping all data on service nodes is hitting a cost and scalability wall. On this talk Josep Prat, Senior Engineering Director at Aiven, gives you an insider’s look at how we are evolving the most popular streaming solution to be more flexible, scalable, and radically more cost-effective.
In this session, we’ll break down the architectural shifts enabling a "diskless" future for Kafka. We will explore how four distinct topic types allow teams to balance performance and cost: from Classic Topics for low-latency needs to Tiered Storage for seamless, API-consistent data aging. We’ll also discuss the impact of Diskless Topics (KIP-1150), which can reduce infrastructure spend by over 94% by using object storage as primary storage, and how Iceberg Topics eliminate the operational overhead of sink connectors for data-lake-bound traffic.
Register now! Spots are limited.