As Big Data Belgium’s first meetup of 2016, we had 2 interesting topics scheduled: Apache Kafka performance and Hadoop use cases in Europe. So, a big thanks goes to both our speakers, but also to Co.Station BXL to host us!
Kafka, the Big Data message broker
Wannes De Smet – Sizing Servers
Often described as the heart of any scalable Big Data cluster, Apache Kafka has quickly become the message broker for your environment. As a message broker’s task is to reliably move messages from component A to B (and C), doing so in a scalable and reliable way with millions of messages is no small feat.
Wannes presented a short intro of Kafka, followed by a deep dive through the entire process of reliably producing and consuming messages. Oh, and doing all that in a distributed, highly-available, fault-tolerant manner, of course. He walked us through some the architectural requirements and operational intrinsics (configuration, monitoring, …) of using and operating a Kafka cluster, based on experiences learned from moving a complex stack to Kafka in production.
So if you are still shifting CSV files around, take some time to get to learn the ultimate upgrade.
Wannes can not share his slide deck with us, but I’m pretty sure that he’ll be keen to share his slides to you personally, if you provide the Sizing Servers Research Lab with your input on their Big Data performance research.
Hadoop in the real world: stories from across Europe
Tim Marston, Director, Regional Alliances, EMEA – Hortonworks
In the 2nd presentation of the evening, Tim Marston introduced us to HDP. This is Hortonworks flavour of Hadoop. He highlighted its strengths as a fully open-source system, before going into more detail on various use cases which they implemented across Europe. The slides give all the details.
Thank you all for being there!
May the data be with you!
