​Agenda​

​5 - 5:45: Pizza / Beer

​​5:45 - 6:15: NetApp, what we do, our role in open source - Mariah McLaughlin, NetApp

​​6:15 - 7:00: Unleashing AI in Cassandra 5 - Ritam Das, NetApp

​​7:00 - 8:00: When “Eventually” Meant 11 ms:
Designing Deterministic Cassandra Architectures in the Telecom Core - Thomas Elliott, Your Augmented Life Advisory Services

​​8:00 - 9:00: Networking

​Background

​NetApp, what we do, our role in open source - Mariah McLaughlin

​Mariah is a Developer Advocate at NetApp Instaclustr with a focus on developing educational content and building community around Apache Cassandra. 

​She will discuss NetApp Instaclustr’s managed platform and their role as an open source contributor in the Apache Cassandra community

​Unleashing AI in Cassandra 5 - Ritam Das

​Ritam Das is a Cloud Solutions Architect at NetApp Instaclustr helping customers consume open-source data platforms like Cassandra, Kafka, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch and more.

​Ritam will discuss enhancements to Cassandra 5, its AI capabilities, and what it has enabled enterprises to do at scale.

​When “Eventually” Meant 11 ms:
Designing Deterministic Cassandra Architectures in the Telecom Core - Thomas Elliott

​Thomas Elliott has had a 25-year career in delivering distributed software systems whose work spans early Cassandra OSS deployments in mobile core networks and modern deterministic data foundations for AI.  As Head of AI and ML Systems at BioSole International, he focuses on using Cassandra to encode data dependencies that enable reproducible, auditable, and constrained AI reasoning.

​Since the early days of the Cassandra Open Source project, it has been recognized as a critical component in the evolution of telecom infrastructure, particularly mobile core networks.  This talk traces how early design constraints shaped architectural decisions in large-scale deployments.  It is a story told across three cities in the Persian Gulf, under tight launch timelines, geopolitical complexity, and read-after-write visibility requirements that had an upper limit of 11ms.