My experience in attending the Apache Big Data & ApacheCon conference 2016 held in Vancouver,BC

I am a contributor and associated with Apache Fineract(incubating) project.

Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked.

Last week I attended two biggest conference of North America. One is ApacheBigdata & another one is ApacheCon. Luckily both the conference were in my home city Vancouver. I got the chance to attend both. Around 3000 attendees from around the world attended the conference and it was held in Hyatt Regency Vancouver. It gathered together the Apache projects, people and technologies working in Big Data, ubiquitous computing and data engineering and science.

Before this event I did not have much knowledge about the Apache’s other cool projects. I came to know about Apache Hadoop, Twill,Spark,Kafka,Zeppelin.Bigtop,Cassandra. As a computer science professional I was always wanted to know(curious) how the big applications like LinkedIn, Netflix ,Intuit and other like so manage so many number of users. Engineers from these companies explained about their infrastructure and how the open source softwares like Hadoop,Spark ,Kafka, Twill and others are the backbones and it does the heavy lifting. They act like plumbing and enables smooth running of biggest applications.

Apache Zeppelin caught my attention. Like Google Document revolutionized the way we create document collaboratively, Apache Zeppelin is the online data visualization tool.One can make beautiful data-driven, interactive and collaborative documents with Spark SQL,Python, Scala, Hive, Flink, Kylin and more. Zeppelin enables rapid development of Spark and Hadoop workflows with simple, easy visualizations. On writing the simple SQL it generates graph on the fly.It includes the interpreter for different language.

One interesting topic was "How to become Well Rested App Developer Rockstar" by Glynn Bird Developer Advocate @ IBM. I can rest & rock too. How ?

He spoke how to secure data layer and one can be in peace of mind while the database is safe and not vulnerable. This can be achieved with a managed database service that:

• Gives users increased visibility and control of technology environments
• Enables users to spend less time obsessing over their database
• Provides simpler integration between technologies

Topics were quite interesting and it left me in a state to know more about this. Not only to know but to use and work on these popular open source cool products.