Enjoy Laid-back Happy Hour with Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, and ClickHouse Insights
Apr 8, 2026
16:00 - 19:00 UTC
Atomico Office, 29 Rathbone St, London W1T 1NJ, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Open Source Happy Hour London
Enjoy afterwork drinks and practical discussions on Apache Kafka, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL and much more. Enjoy a session designed for data engineers, architects and technical decisions-makers like you, who want to address the challenges they face in data-infrastructure. No high-level pitches but straight into practical discussions on how to build scalable, efficient open sourced-powered data platforms.
What's on the menu (other than happy hour drinks):
Context Is the New Infrastructure (Stan Dmitriev, Product Director of Aiven Context)
AI agents are powerful - until they hit your data and have no idea what anything means. This talk shows why metadata context is becoming as important as uptime, introduces Aiven for DataHub as the managed catalog layer for your data estate, and demonstrates what happens when AI agents can (and can't) reason about your infrastructure.
Practical, live, and relevant whether you run PostgreSQL, Kafka, Clickhouse or all of the above.
Intro to Apache Kafka on Aiven: From Managed Simplicity to Inkless Architectures (Hugh Evans, Senior Product Advocate at Aiven)
Apache Kafka is the backbone of real-time data pipelines across the industry, but running it well is hard. This talk starts with a practical look at what Aiven's managed Kafka offering gives you out of the box: high availability, automated ops, and the freedom to focus on building rather than babysitting brokers.
From there, Hugh will walk through Inkless Kafka: Aiven's cloud-optimised architecture that decouples compute from storage, moving data to object storage and cutting infrastructure costs by up to 80%. You'll see how Inkless topics sit alongside classic Kafka topics in the same cluster, what the latency and throughput tradeoffs actually look like in practice, and when it makes sense to reach for each.
Secure your spot via the registration form.
Secure Your Seat
Meet Our Hosts
Senior Product Advocate, Aiven
Hugh is a Senior Developer Advocate at Aiven with a background in software development, cloud infrastructure, and community building. He helps developers and data teams explore how open source technologies can power modern data and AI use cases. Outside of Aiven, Hugh organizes AI Signals, a community dedicated to real-world applications of AI, and advocates for vocational learning as an important pathway into technology careers.
Product Director, Aiven Context
As Product Director at Aiven, Stan Dmitriev solves the "context gap" in modern data systems. Leading the Context initiative, he builds the tools that allow AI agents and users to find, understand, and act on data at scale. With a decade-long track record in product management and startup growth, Stan is a pragmatist who believes the best innovation happens in production. He helps organizations harness open-source data tech to innovate fast without sacrificing reliability.
Why Attend?
- Connect with local data and tech professionals
- Get practical insights into streaming, storage, and analytics with Kafka, Iceberg, PostgreSQL, and ClickHouse
- Learn how to reduce operational overhead while scaling your data infrastructure performance
- Bring your questions and challenges for direct discussions with Aiven experts
Benefits of Aiven Platform
Multi-cloud solutions
Aiven's capability to deploy to any cloud empowers your organization with:
- Workload and Cost Optimization: Choose the ideal cloud provider for each task to maximize performance and cost-efficiency. Benefit from competitive pricing across different cloud providers.
- Risk Mitigation: Distribute data and applications across regions and providers for enhanced business continuity.
- Streamlined Operations: Manage your data infrastructure on a centralized platform across multiple clouds to reduce complexity and ensure compliance with data residency regulations.
Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)
Aiven offers flexible deployment options for your data services, catering to various business needs and preferences. Choose the deployment model that best aligns with your organization's priorities, whether it's convenience, cost savings, or maximum control.
- Aiven infrastructure: A hassle-free solution where Aiven takes care of all cloud configurations, maintenance, and costs, allowing you to focus on your core business.
- Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC): Deploy Aiven services directly to your existing cloud account giving you greater control over your data and infrastructure. BYOC allows you to:
- Leverage your existing cloud investments and negotiated discounts.
- Maintain strict control over your data and comply with specific security or regulatory requirements.
- Customize your infrastructure to meet your unique needs.
- Benefit from Aiven's expertise and support while retaining full control.
Choice of integrated open source services
Build with Aiven's popular data services that best fit your specific use cases to stream, store, and serve data to your systems and applications.
- Build faster with skilled talent: Gain access to the skills of a broad community of open source experts.
- Innovation and Collaboration: Benefit from open source's collaborative culture which accelerates the development of new features and improvements.
- Security and Reliability: Improve security and reliability compared to proprietary software where the code is not publicly accessible. The open nature of open source ensures that many eyes are constantly reviewing and testing the code.
Cross-cloud and cross-region disaster recovery
Aiven enables your data infrastructure to be highly available, reliable, and operational even in the face of disruptions or failures.
- High Availability: Leverage multiple availability zones, regions, and providers to ensure your data is replicated and distributed across different locations. If one location or provider experiences an outage, your services can seamlessly failover to another, minimizing downtime.
- Automated Backups and Recovery: Aiven automatically creates backups of your data at regular intervals. In case of data loss or corruption, you can easily restore your data from these backups, ensuring business continuity.
AI database optimization to boost efficiency
Aiven's AI Database Optimizer quickly helps your organization understand how to tune your PostgreSQL and MySQL queries to save your organization engineering time, and money on your database bills.
- Accelerate development: Receive AI-driven index and SQL rewrite suggestions in minutes.
- Reduce incident resolution time: Gain real-time performance insights and optimization suggestions.
- Optimize before production: Ensure applications are performant and scalable before release.
- Free up DBA resources: Allow DBAs to focus on high-value tasks.