What Went Down at the Virtual Druid Summit

Socially Distant Druids Still Bring the Goods

I want first to thank everyone involved with making our first, albeit a tad non-standard, Druid Summit a smashing success. We, and the hundreds of folks who had purchased tickets, were extremely disappointed to postpone our first physical Druid Summit to November, but we were fortunate to have 10 great speakers agree to do their presentations virtually, so we grabbed our masks and our Zoom licenses and got to work.

To keep with our original date, that meant we had 3 weeks to change course. Luckily,
we weren’t sure what to expect as we headed out into the uncharted waters of a global virtual event. So when the week ahead of the event when we saw that it was we had almost 700 registrants everybody was absolutely thrilled with the response, and, the morning of the event, there were over a thousand people registered and eagerly waiting for top-notch Druid content. Personally, as the emcee, standing up in front of a thousand people at a live event might have given even a scarred-and-cantankerous speaker like me some pause, but since it was just me in my dining room seemingly talking to my cat, I figured I had it handled.

But luckily for everyone (especially my cat – who found the event quite meow-ving and purr-fect), the speakers ended up needing very little help from me. Their stories of the whys and hows they are using Druid to solve real life problems spoke for themselves. Our audience was actively engaged – asking over 150 questions across the sessions – and rounded out the narratives with well considered questions that made my job very easy.

Earl The Cat Enjoying Virtual Druid Summit

All of this shows that a community pulling together, even in times of uncertainty and chaos, can really do impressive things. Kudos to the Imply marketing team for pulling this together, to all of our speakers for being flexible and responsive, and to FJ, Vad and Gian for keeping the faith and answering everyone’s questions. Most importantly, kudos to all of you curious and active Druids out there! Thank you for your support and participation in our Virtual Druid Summit, Coronavirus Edition. Until we can safely “see” you again… wash your hands and Keep on Druiding!

The talks from Virtual Druid Summit are listed below. You can find the recordings and slides here:

Gian Merlino, Apache Druid PMC Chair, offers his reflections on the Druid journey to date, plus describes his vision for what Druid will become.

Automating CI/CD for Druid Clusters at Athena Health

Athena Health is creating a new performance management application for its clients. One of its key components is Apache Druid.

Apache Druid for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) at DBS Bank

The DBS compliance team uses Druid to help with anti-money laundering (AML) , allowing them to explore anomalies and apply machine learning.

How Apache Druid Powers Real-Time Analytics at BT

BT discusses their Apache Druid journey, which started in early 2019 when they asked Imply to help us with an in-house Network Performance Management project