Apache Polaris™ (incubating) Meetup Seattle
Seattle Apache Polaris™ (incubating) Meetup!
Join us on September 9th (Tuesday) from 5:00-8:30 PM at the Snowflake Bellevue Office.
Connect with fellow community members, share insights, and dive into the latest developments in the world of Apache Polaris!
Note on Parking: You are welcome to use our complimentary visitor parking in the Snowflake Garage located at 123rd Ave NE. Drive down the ramp and take a left at the bottom (Level A). Park in any available parking space. After parking, follow the signage to the garage elevator, up to Level 1. From there, proceed right to the Building Lobby.
Agenda
5:00p - 6:00p: Doors Open & Networking
6:00p - 7:30p: Welcome Remarks & Presentations!
7:30p - 8:30p: More Networking
The event will focus on use cases of and new developments in Apache Polaris (https://polaris.apache.org/)
Building Open Lakehouses: Apache Polaris Meets MinIO and the S3-compatible ecosystem, Dmitri Bourlatchkov @ Dremio and Karthic Rao @ MinIO
This joint talk brings together two perspectives on the cutting edge of open lakehouse technology. Dmitri Bourlatchkov (Dremio) will share the latest developments in Apache Polaris (Incubating), the open source Apache Iceberg catalog that now supports S3-compatible storage systems. He'll walk through the architectural updates that make it easier than ever to register, govern, and query Iceberg tables on object storage.
Following that, Karthic Rao (MinIO) will explore why MinIO is a natural choice as the S3-compatible storage layer for your Iceberg-based lakehouse. With high performance, enterprise-grade resiliency, and API fidelity, MinIO provides the foundation for scalable and interoperable lakehouse deployments across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Together, these mini-sessions illustrate how Polaris's new s3-compatible storage support empowers organizations to build truly open, flexible, and future-proof Iceberg lakehouses—free from vendor lock-in and optimized for modern analytics and AI workloads.
ASF Incubator and Polaris Podling Update, JB Onofré @ ASF
After a quick intro about the ASF Incubator and how it works, we will see the current state of the Maturity Model for Polaris podling, the path to graduation, and how you can get involved.
Inside Apache Polaris: Extending the Core, Michael Collado @ Snowflake
Apache Polaris™ (incubating) was designed to adapt to diverse organizational requirements. This session provides a practical walkthrough of how to tailor Polaris to your environment. We’ll start with the fundamentals of the Polaris runtime and its dependency injection framework, then explore extension points and out-of-the-box implementations for core services such as multitenancy, authentication and federation, authorization, and metadata persistence. You’ll leave with the knowledge needed to shape a Polaris deployment that aligns with your organization’s policies, infrastructure, and scale.
Polaris is the tip of the Iceberg: Zero to Managed Data Lake with Fivetran, Sean Lynch @ Fivetran
While we are all tech enthusiasts, customers shouldn't have to be a tech enthusiast to get the value out of data lakes. At Fivetran our mission is to make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity. In this talk we will go over how we connect to sources, ingest that data into Iceberg and how we integrate with external catalogs and serve the data through Apache Polaris™. We will cover the design choices we made to get the simplest solution for our customers.
About Dremio
Dremio is the intelligent lakehouse platform that accelerates AI and analytics with AI-ready data products, unified access, and automated performance optimization. Built on Apache Iceberg, Arrow, and Polaris, Dremio combines a business-friendly semantic layer, a high-speed SQL engine, and an enterprise-grade catalog to deliver fast, governed, and discoverable data across cloud and on-prem environment
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About MinIO
MinIO is the company behind AIStor, the world’s most widely adopted exascale object store for enterprise AI data, agentic computing, and analytics. Trusted by 77% of the Fortune 100 and built for performance at scale, AIStor unifies structured and unstructured data in a single, consistent system. It's object-native, hybrid by design, and fully S3-compatible. Run it anywhere: from edge to core to cloud.
Whether you're training massive models, deploying AI agents, or scaling your data lakehouse, AIStor delivers the speed, control, and scale your workloads demand.
About Snowflake
Snowflake makes enterprise AI easy, efficient and trusted. More than 10,000 companies around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to share data, build applications, and power their business with AI. Snowflake provides native support for Apache Iceberg™ and Apache Polaris™ (incubating).
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