Cassandra Day London 2015: Full Schedule

09:30 BST

Registration & Breakfast

Wednesday April 22, 2015 09:30 - 10:15 BST
TBA

10:15 BST

The Resilience of Apache Cassandra

Showing how Cassandra resilience can keep your data save even when a multitude of failures happen. This is a description how our team kept a 15 node cluster running (3 nodes per DC, 5 DCs) when a multiple DC fail happen and the cluster was already stretched out resource wise.

Speakers

Carlos Rolo

Cassandra Consultant, Pythian

Currently a Cassandra Consultant at Pythian, previously I was a CDN Engineer in Leaseweb Netherlands for the last 3 and half years and fully developed their Cassandra environment and all the tooling and software to work with it. Previous to that I was a Software Engineer in Portugal... Read More →

Wednesday April 22, 2015 10:15 - 10:45 BST
Edinburgh Suite

Best Practices Technical

10:15 BST

Become an Internet Enterprise, with DataStax

Learn how innovative companies are using NoSQL technologies like Apache Cassandra to reinvent their business and build smart online applications. DataStax executives will share their knowledge on harnessing the power of big data to drive strategic business decisions.

Speakers

Amy McNee

VP of Global Customer Operations, DataStax

Amy McNee is the VP of Global Customer Operations.

Wednesday April 22, 2015 10:15 - 11:00 BST
Cambria Suite

Internet Enterprise

10:15 BST

Getting Started with Apache Cassandra and DataStax

This is a crash course introduction to Cassandra. You'll step away understanding how it's possible to to utilize this distributed database to achieve high availability across multiple data centers, scale out as your needs grow, and not be woken up at 3am just because a server failed. We'll cover the basics of data modeling with CQL, and understand how that data is stored on disk. We'll wrap things up by setting up Cassandra locally, so bring your laptops.

Speakers

Jon Haddad

Apache Cassandra Evangelist, DataStax

Jon Haddad has 10 years experience in both development and operations working at startups in southern California. For the last 2 years he's been a committer to cqlengine, the Python object mapper for Cassandra. He's now a Technical Evangelist at Datastax, continuing to focus on advancing... Read More →

Luke Tillman

Apache Cassandra Language Evangelist, DataStax

Luke Tillman is a Language Evangelist for Apache Cassandra at DataStax, with a focus on the .NET community but a passion for polyglot. He’s spent over 15 years as a software engineer, writing code for web applications both large and small. Prior to DataStax, he worked as a software... Read More →

Wednesday April 22, 2015 10:15 - 11:15 BST
Cornwall Suite

Beginner Technical

10:45 BST

The Role of Cassandra in a Modern Microservices Enterprise Platform

Building a Microservices platform takes time and challenges a number of traditions in our industry. Coming to grasp with the Brewer's theorem, BASE, streaming, and de-normalisation of data is a crucial step in accomplishing a successful Microservices platform.

There's a lot of theory on Microservices out there, and with your nose up to the grindstone and progress slow it can at times be difficult to relate to and to remember how important it all is. With a run through of development styles of streaming, raw event stores, event sourcing, graph databases, and drilling down to infrastructure components like Graphite, Kibana, and Zipkin, this talk will share with you the experience needed to implement Microservices, with Cassandra as a cornerstone technology, in a modern polyglot persistence enterprise platform.

With 6 years experience breaking up a monolith java+sql enterprise dinosaur into a Microservices platform today existing with over 200 thrift and http services – Mick can give a hands on account of facing these challenges.

Speakers

Mck Semb Wever

Mick designs, builds, and is an evangelist for distributed systems, from data-driven backends using Cassandra, Hadoop, Spark, to enterprise Microservices platforms.With 6 years experience at FINN.no building a Microservices platform, along with introducing data-driven solutions and... Read More →

Wednesday April 22, 2015 10:45 - 11:15 BST
Edinburgh Suite

Best Practices Technical

11:00 BST

DataStax Customer Spotlight

TBA

Wednesday April 22, 2015 11:00 - 11:40 BST
Cambria Suite

Internet Enterprise

11:15 BST

Getting Started with Apache Cassandra and Java

In this session you’ll learn just enough to get started with NoSQL Apache Cassandra and Java, including how to install, build and try out some basic API calls. You’ll learn the basics of how to code your first application in Java on top of Cassandra, and leave the session feeling confident and excited to take the next step!

Speakers

Christopher Batey

Apache Cassandra Evangelist, DataStax

Christopher Batey is a Technical Evangelist for Apache Cassandra at DataStax. Previous to working at DataStax he was a software engineer at Sky, where he spent his time designing and developing their next generation OTT platform. He founded the Stubbed Cassandra project (www.scassandra.org... Read More →

Wednesday April 22, 2015 11:15 - 12:15 BST
Cornwall Suite

Beginner Technical

11:15 BST

British Gas Connected Homes: 5 Things We Wish We Had Known Before Building a Data Platform

British Gas Connected Homes (the creators of Hive Active Heating) embarked last year in the creation of a unified platform for all their different IoT projects. The company is a subsidiary of British Gas specialising in connected devices in the home and handles data ranging from smart gas and electricity meters to connected thermostats and boilers. Jim Anning and Josep Casals will go through their experience building a unified platform with Apache Cassandra, Apache Spark and related technologies. Focus will be of the main lessons learnt and the things they wish they had known beforehand.

Speakers

Josep Casals

Lead Data Engineer, British Gas Connected Homes

Josep Casals is Lead Data Engineer at British Gas Connected Homes. He specialises on data platforms, the Internet of Things and technological innovation. His previous experience includes successful startups in the field of Telecoms and Software as a Service.

Wednesday April 22, 2015 11:15 - 12:15 BST
Edinburgh Suite

Best Practices Technical

11:40 BST

DataStax Partner Presentation

Wednesday April 22, 2015 11:40 - 12:15 BST
Cambria Suite

Internet Enterprise

12:15 BST

Q&A Panel Discussion

Speakers

Christopher Batey

Apache Cassandra Evangelist, DataStax

Jon Haddad

Apache Cassandra Evangelist, DataStax

Luke Tillman

Apache Cassandra Language Evangelist, DataStax

Wednesday April 22, 2015 12:15 - 12:30 BST
Cornwall Suite

Beginner Technical

12:15 BST

Q&A Panel Discussion

Speakers

Josep Casals

Lead Data Engineer, British Gas Connected Homes

Carlos Rolo

Cassandra Consultant, Pythian

Mck Semb Wever

Wednesday April 22, 2015 12:15 - 12:30 BST
Edinburgh Suite

Best Practices Technical

12:30 BST

Lunch

Wednesday April 22, 2015 12:30 - 13:15 BST
Crown, Drawing Room & Coronet Suite

Break

13:15 BST

Cassandra at Hailo

This will be a classic "use-case" story of how Cassandra fits in to Hailo, how it's enabled us to run our business, and how its made our lives easier.

I'll include a story of how our use of databases has evolved over time.

I will also give some detail on the way we've learned to tackle some common problems:
* Coping with Micro-services
* Automation
* Monitoring of Cassandra (hopefully with an introduction to a newly open-sourced monitoring tool written in-house)
* Backing it up and restoring data

Speakers

Chris Hoolihan

Infrastructure Architect, Hailo

Chris is the Infrastructure Architect at Hailo, and long-time user of Cassandra. Appreciates elegant system design.

Wednesday April 22, 2015 13:15 - 13:45 BST
Edinburgh Suite

Best Practices Technical

13:15 BST

Apache Cassandra Data Modeling 101

Relational systems have always been built on the premise of modeling relationships. As you will see, static schema, one-to-one, many-to-many still have a place in Cassandra. From the familiar, we’ll go into the specific differences in Cassandra and tricks to make your application fast and resilient.

Speakers

Patrick McFadin

Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra, DataStax

Patrick McFadin is regarded as one of the foremost experts of Apache Cassandra and data modeling techniques. As the Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra and consultant for DataStax, he has helped build some of the largest deployments in the world. Previous to DataStax, he was Chief... Read More →

Wednesday April 22, 2015 13:15 - 14:15 BST
Cornwall Suite

Beginner Technical

13:45 BST

DSE and Lionsgate: Build Your Own Massive Scalable Application with Ease

Client: "We want you to build us a Big Data platform, capable of analysing billions of transactions in real time".

Semblent: "Ummm, ok".

Client: "We will only pay for three developers...".

Semblent: "Errr, ok".

Client: "....and by the way, you have 4 months".

Semlent: "Owch.... ok".

We did it... and here's how!

Speakers

Sam Forster

CEO, Semblent

Semblent CEO & founder. Background: entrepreneur & unsuccessful investor. Likes: science, wine, technology, suits, armwrestling. Dislikes: beards.

Wednesday April 22, 2015 13:45 - 14:45 BST
Edinburgh Suite

Best Practices Technical

14:15 BST

Diagnosing Problems in Production

This sessions covers diagnosing and solving common problems encountered in production, using performance profiling tools. We’ll also give a crash course to basic JVM garbage collection tuning. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of what they should look for when they encounter problems with their in-production Cassandra cluster. This talk is intended for people with a general understanding of Cassandra, but it not required to have experience running it in production.

Speakers

Jon Haddad

Apache Cassandra Evangelist, DataStax

Wednesday April 22, 2015 14:15 - 15:15 BST
Cornwall Suite

Beginner Technical

14:45 BST

Securing Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise

This talk will introduce the various options around securing Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise. Attendees will gain an understanding of the various features and options available for protecting systems using Cassandra, OpsCenter and DataStax Enterprise.

Speakers

Johnny Miller

Cassandra Solutions Architect, DataStax

Johnny Miller is an experienced developer, architect, team lead and agile coach with a history of working at Sky, AOL and Alcatel-Lucent. Johnny has architected and delivered a number of enterprise platforms using Cassandra as a key component for achieving high availability and efficient... Read More →

Wednesday April 22, 2015 14:45 - 15:15 BST
Edinburgh Suite

Best Practices Technical

15:15 BST

Break

Wednesday April 22, 2015 15:15 - 15:35 BST
TBA

Break

15:35 BST

Apache Cassandra Anti-Patterns

You wouldn't try and use a saw to hammer a nail so why do people try to use databases as queues? Or perhaps more subtly: rely on atomic updates to mutable data distributed across the world (when you say it out loud is sounds a bit ridiculous right?)

In this talk we're going to go through the most common ways to misuse Cassandra. Some are obvious and you should be using a different kind of technology, like the queue example, but others you just need to change the way you're using Cassandra.

Topics we'll cover:
* Joins (yes we'll get started with the obvious one)
* Mutable data / read then write / breaking the laws of physics
* Really wide rows (but the Internet said wide rows were good?)
* Batches!
* Multi partition queries a.k.a ReadTimeout heaven
* Secondary indexes under the covers
* Tripping over tombstones

Crazy retry policies: I am looking at you Downgrading retry policy
Misusing technology isn't isolated to the distributed database world, I used to work on a small piece of queueing software called WebSphereMQ and what do you know? A good portion of our customers used it as a database!

Speakers

Christopher Batey

Apache Cassandra Evangelist, DataStax

Wednesday April 22, 2015 15:35 - 16:20 BST
Edinburgh Suite

Best Practices Technical

15:35 BST

Building Your First Application in Apache Cassandra

You’ve heard the talks, followed the tutorials, and done the research. You are a font of Cassandra knowledge. Now it’s time to change the world! (Or at least build something to make your boss happy). In this talk we’ll walk through the process of building KillrVideo, an open source video sharing website where users can upload and share videos, rate them, comment on them, and more. By looking at a real application, we’ll talk about architectural decisions, how the application drives the data model, some pro tips when using the DataStax drivers, and some lessons learned from mistakes made along the way. You’ll leave this session ready to start building your next application (world-changing or otherwise) with Cassandra.

Speakers