A few months ago, I had a unique opportunity to represent Betfair at the prestigious Kafka Summit in London where I presented the story behind how the Betfair Exchange evolved technologically from a monolithic system with serious reliability problems that was tightly coupled to an RDBMS, to a modern, event-driven, scalable and reliable platform, that is the backbone of our global business today.

The talk mainly focused on how Kafka has played and continues to play a central role in this transformation. It was a fifty minute talk at the end of a long day of presentations and I was the only one standing between the audience and a cocktail party at the time. However, I was both surprised and proud of the turnout at this session, which I was told was the largest the Use cases stream of talks, for the entire day and I thoroughly enjoyed presenting our work to the packed audience. Given the time, the presentation had a deliberately casual tone,  but the technical crux of the presentation was not lost on anyone. After the presentation I had the opportunity to interact with architects and senior developers from various organisations across the globe, who were interested in delving deeper into the technical nitty-gritties of our system and in discussing how they could solve their own problems, using some of the patterns we have used at Betfair.

Here is a brief abstract of the presentation, Confluent hosted video recording, standalone video and the slides from the presentation.

Kafka Summit is the premier event for data architects, engineers, devops professionals, and developers who want to learn about streaming data. It brings the Apache Kafka community together to share best practices, write code, and discuss the future of streaming technologies. I was really privileged to represent Betfair here and showcase what is a truly world class distributed system implementation built around Kafka, more importantly presenting the outcome of painstaking and diligent hard work of the entire Exchange Platform development team, here in London, over a number of years.

If you like to be part of this journey as we continue to evolve the Exchange towards an exciting future, apply here.