Big Data Tech Warsaw Summit 2019 summary

It’s been already more than a month after Big Data Tech Warsaw Summit 2019, but it’s spirit is still among us — that’s why we’ve decided to prolong it and share with you a short summary of this event. At the very beginning, a very big thank you to Evention for a great deal of help with organizing BDTWS 2019.

During this year’s edition, 63 Big Data experts delivered 27 presentations and leaded 27 panel discussion tables. And we didn’t yet mention the workshop part. Each year we’re setting a new record high results in terms of the number of participants and panel discussion tables — this time it was no different.

We’re extremely glad to receive numerous positive feedbacks on the spot and later on the social media feeds. One of them, written by Kamil Szkoda (you can read it here) pointed out the professionalism and purely technical approach of the event.

What were the other advantages of Big Data Tech Warsaw Summit? It was a gathering of Big Data experts from all around the world — this has secured the objective, multi-perspective approach of BDTWS. The discussed topics (AI, ML, cloud-based solutions to name a few) addressed the most recent, game-changing events such as Cloudera — Hortonworks merger or ongoing trends like cloud transitions and rising popularity and importance of Kubernetes. This helped every not-so-experienced with Big Data world participant to catch up with the industry. And the last but not least: highly meritorical speeches.

The BDTWS audience has chosen the five best presentations. These were: AI applied: filtering RTB traffic at Ad Tech scale delivered by Paweł Zawistowski (Adform); The Changing Face of ETL: Event-Driven Architectures for Data Engineers by Robin Moffatt (Confluent), Towards next generation, cloud-ready and open-source big data discovery platform presented by Krzysztof Zarzycki and Marek Wiewiórka (GetInData); Streaming Visualization by Guido Schmutz (Trivadis) and From legacy to cloud: an end to end data integration journey delivered by Max Schultze (Zalando). We’re proud to stress that the presentation performed by our Big Data experts colleagues from GetInData gathered not only top reviews but also a numerous audience.

Marek (on the left) and Krzysiek during their presentation

Big Data Tech Warsaw Summit 2019 consisted also of two-day workshops conducted by representatives from GetInData, and Google and XCaliber. We’re glad that Hadoop Ecosystem Basics workshop conducted by Piotr Krewski, GetInData’s Co-founder, received positive reviews for a very good level and complete overview of Hadoop ecosystem. Big Data on Kubernetes training led by Maciej Bryliński of XCaliber was also appreciated by the audience that underlined the unique meritorical background and a model-like way of delivering the presentation.

What are BDTWS main findings and outlook for the close future? The closing panel (and many others) were addressing this issue. The hottest topic was a shift towards Kubernetes at the cost of the Hadoop ecosystem — this is, among others, supported by the roots of the Cloudera-Hortonworks merger. When these two, heavily involved in the Hadoop environment competitors are joining their forces, it must be a sign of some negative trends in the Hadoop market. IBM acquires RedHat for its commercial Kubernetes version (OpenShift) and VMware announced the acquisition of Heptio, a company founded by Kubernetes originators. Although many agree that Kubernetes times are coming, a definite shift towards the new ecosystem is not prejudged despite various Kubernetes advantages in comparison with the Hadoop ecosystem (simplicity, open-source basis, high user experience).

The other underlined megatrends were: rising popularity of open source solutions in the cloud environment (what is associated with the rise of Kubernetes) and data scientists shortage. Besides the general observations, the conference speeches were full of various meritorical curiosities. One of them was the advanced filtering features used by Booking.com — i was really surprised when the speakers entered (after turning the website to english version) the following combination of letters kibdib and the search engine returned results for London. How’s that possible? If you take a look at your QWERTY keyboard and analyse the location of kibdib and London, you’ll find out that the following letters are (almost!) exactly next to each other. This feature was designed to omit of a mistakenly inputted command in the search toolbar and return the correct, desired result.

All in all, the impressive statistics of Big Data Tech Warsaw Summit (fifth year in a row!) are not only the proof of great Evention and GetInData’s organisational skills, but first and foremost, the growing importance of data and data management in the modern, digitalized world. We do really hope that the next year’s edition, Big Data Tech Warsaw Summit 2020, will attract the greater audience and more speakers. Hope to see you next year!