Vol #10 | Which are the "Data" Summits that I attend
My dear friends,
So happy to bring volume no 10 of "Cloud & Data" to you!
We have reached a milestone—a small one but an important one.
Thanks to you all for encouraging me & showing your support.
In this special edition, I'll list some of the "data" conferences and summits that I usually attend. These have helped me to gain knowledge of the latest features and trends within the data community.
A quick background about these summits or community days
Data summits or community days are the annual conferences organised by product vendors, communities or cloud service providers to discuss about various trends in the data world, provide training sessions or to launch new services & features.
By just attending these, you will get to learn a lot of things at the global industry level. Also, these are great opportunities to network with like-minded data folks - virtually or physically.
Here are the summits I’ve attended or planning to attend this year - all virtual.
AWS re:Invent
The Annual AWS global event generally happens in the last week of November. Many new services or features are launched yearly, and you can learn about these at this conference. Virtual mode is available, and you can build your schedule in advance.
Snowflake Summit
The Snowflake summit was an in-person event in mid-June 2022 that happened in Las Vegas! There was no virtual mode, so I could not attend any of the live sessions. However, you can watch the session recordings to get insights into various new features like Unistore for unifying OLTP and OLAP workloads.
Databricks - Data & AI Summit
The "Data & AI" Summit 2022 just concluded last week (June 2022). Databricks organised this summit; the best part is it was also available in virtual mode. Most of the sessions were during nighttime (IST), so all my friends in India could attend these post their work hours. The sessions are also available on-demand; you can watch them in your free time. Some of the new announcements includes open-sourcing all features of delta lake
Airflow Summit
Conducted in hybrid mode, over 5 days. Airflow is one tool that is widely used across cloud platforms. I was not able to attend these sessions but if you are using Airflow actively in your projects then you should not miss this conference.
Subsurface
This is a cloud data lake conference! Yes, you read that right - it’s a conference dedicated to cloud data lakes organised by Dremio. I attended it for the first time and really enjoyed some of the sessions and came to know about the open formats like Apache Iceberg & the whole world around modern lakehouse projects. The best session among all was by Bill Inmon himself on his views on the evolution of lakehouse
Coalesce
This one is for Analytics Engineers. This is a new role that is getting a lot of attention in the modern data world. If you are using dbt or plan to use it in your projects, you should definitely attend this. This year, it is happening in October 2022 and you can register here. Virtual events are free to attend so don’t forget to register.
Data Governance Community Day
Organised by DataQG, this is a community day that is happening on September 14th 2022. Everyone working in the data world should attend this to Connect, Collaborate and Contribute to the Data Governance efforts. The sessions are from 6.30 pm (IST) onwards so my friends in India can attend these post their work hours. Admission is free and you can register here
AWS Summit - India
While re:Invent is a global event, AWS Summit - India is specific to the India region. It is a free online conference to connect with other AWS practitioners and learn more about AWS services. The “Big Data & Analytics” track has very good training sessions for new developers as well as experienced architects. I have learnt a lot from the training sessions organised as part of the AWS India Summit.
This is just a small list of the various “data” conferences that happen around the globe. There are other conferences/days/events organised by Microsoft, Google and many other organisations which we all can benefit from.
I’d suggest you start attending a few “interesting” sessions of your choice and see the difference it makes to your “data” knowledge. It is a world of information and you have to be selective while choosing the sessions.
In my future article, I’ll try to write about some of the sessions that you can watch offline. These can help you in your day-to-day work as well as expand your data horizons.
Thanks for reading & have a great Sunday!