Last Call—and Know Before You Go—For Druid Summit 2024

We are two weeks away from the first in-person Druid Summit! We are so excited to see you at the Grand Bay Hotel in Redwood City, California, on October 22, 2024. We’re putting the finishing touches on what promises to be a great event. 

In our previous blog, we talked about the themes for Druid Summit, including deployment and operations, streaming, lakehouse, and user experience. In this blog, we’ll introduce some of the panels, keynotes, and speakers that we have in store.

Keynotes

Keynotes set the tone for any summit or conference, and Druid Summit is no exception. The keynotes we have lined up for you will give you a look back at how far Druid has come, how much progress has been made, explain shifting trends in data environments, and chart a course for Druid’s future. 

Our opening keynote, presented by one of Apache Druid’s original authors and Imply’s Chief of Emerging Solutions Eric Tschetter, will talk about how event data is becoming increasingly important in digital environments. Eric will also discuss how Druid’s event-first approach can transform the way that teams manage increasingly complex queries and infrastructure.

“I’ll be talking about a pattern that I’m seeing more and more as we work with people to help them achieve their product goals,” Eric explains.

Our next keynote, featuring Imply VP of Product Gabriel Tavridis and Product Manager Will Xu, will review developments for both open source Druid and Imply Polaris, our managed Druid-as-a-service product, and preview what’s to come. 

This is definitely a session you’ll want to see. When asked what folks can expect to see during the presentation, Gabriel had quite a list. “MSQ interactive, upserts, projections, JSON Columns, async query, schemaless ingestion, new indexing types, Iceberg, full SQL for Druid, and so on. This is a great opportunity to learn about the latest greatest advancements in Druid and Imply Polaris and get a sneak peek and demo of what is coming in 2025.”

Our last keynote will be presented by Apache Druid PMC Chair and Imply Co-Founder and CTO Gian Merlino, who will continue Eric’s theme of event data. Gian will talk more about how the data landscape is changing, as well as the exciting developments planned for Druid’s future. 

Introducing Panels!

Taking advantage of Druid Summit being in person this year, we’ve added several panels to the agenda to showcase different perspectives of key topics like streaming, lakehouse, user experience, and deployment and operations. These panels will feature Druid PMC members, committers, and data heavyweights from the greater ecosystem including folks from Apple, Atlassian, Google, Bytewax, and the Data Visualization Society.

Real-time streaming analytics

Hosted by Claritype’s Head of GTM Rachel Pedreschi, this panel will discuss how Apache Druid fits into real-time data architectures, alongside other streaming technologies like Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, and Python. Our expert guests, from AWS, Decodable, Atlassian, NStream, and Bytewax, will talk about lessons learned from putting streaming into production, balancing performance and correctness, the future of streaming, and much more.

Lakehouse analytics

For years, Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake have been the undisputed leaders of the data lakehouse space—but Druid is here and making a splash. Moderated by Dave Klein, Developer Advocate at Imply, this panel will explore where Druid fits in the lakehouse paradigm, how Druid does batch ingestion, how to use Druid’s multi-stage query engine (MSQ) for machine learning, and more.

Data visualization

This one is near and dear to my heart because I am moderating! By presenting data in an interactive, intuitive format, dashboards and UIs bridge the gap between raw data and human understanding—making data visualization an indispensable component of the analytics workflow. Learn about some of the top mistakes people make when building graphics for real-time data, personal experiences with various tools, who should even be using real-time data in their UIs in the first place, and more.

Dev, ops, and optimization

Get all the practical tips for implementing and configuring Druid in all manner of environments. Hosted by Imply Developer Advocate Hugh Evans, this discussion will cover all the operational questions you’ve probably thought about—but never had the opportunity to ask, including how to get 100 millisecond queries, best tools for CI/CD pipelines, scaling, and more.

Not to end this with a sense of urgency but time is ticking—we’re so close to October 22nd. Register now to see these keynotes and panels, along with all the other amazing sessions, while you still can!