Uniting Open Source and Modern Data Stack at OSA CON 2023

ByRobert Hodges
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OSA CON 2023 is a wrap. 3 days, 43 talks, 53 speakers, thousands of registrations, and one offline meetup in San Francisco. The registration count alone was over four times the number for OSA CON 2022! 

If you missed the conference and would like to see any of the talks, all recordings are posted on Airmeet. You can get access to all of them using your Airmeet event link that you received when signing up. If you don’t have the link, get one using the Join the replay link on the OSA CON 2023 website. We’ll be moving all videos and slides to a permanent site in January. 

Building attendance is gratifying, but OSA CON was also successful in more fundamental ways. 

  • Showcasing open source analytic projects. Starting with Jun Rao presenting on “Reinventing Kafka in the Data Streaming Era” to the final talk by Shirshanka Das on “How to Implement Data Contracts with DataHub,” we saw dozens of innovative and mature tools to understand the flood of data in digital enterprises.
  • Enabling synergy. Analytic applications run in stacks. The keynotes stressed integration and how to achieve business-altering advances in cost-efficiency. Learning about other projects also helped us to look beyond the narrow corners many of us work in. Just one example: thanks to talks on projects like Flink, Kafka, and TimePlus, I can now see new ways to help our customers join stream processing to ClickHouse databases we manage for them. 
  • Sharing new paradigms. Multiple talks explored how to update the popular modern data stack using API-based tools, open source code, and cloud native operation. OSA CON demonstrated that the open source, modern data stack paradigm is better defined and more mature than many of us knew. The most gratifying feedback was hearing attendees say that the conference helped them see a fundamentally different strategy to implement analytics based on open source. 

This conference could not have happened without help from a bunch of people working together. Here are some shoutouts. 

  • Our amazing speakers, all 53 of you. 
  • Our sponsors, including Google Cloud, Cube, Presto Foundation, Packt Publishing, and Clowder Space. 
  • MUX for providing a San Francisco venue as well as food and drink for the Tuesday offline event. 
  • The Altinity and Preset Marketing teams for their hard work to put the conference together and spread the word. 
  • Software Guru for building the site, handling registrations, and running the online conference flawlessly. 
  • Max Beauchemin, CEO of Preset, for being the spark that started the OSA CON 2023 effort back in June.
  • And of course…Our audience. Your enthusiasm, support, and interest in open source analytics are the reasons we created the conference. Knowing that you learned and drew insight from the talks is the biggest reward of all. 

It’s now time to think about the future. We are of course looking to go bigger and better for OSA CON 2024. Besides growing the conference, we’re considering how to build out a year-round community. Watch out for emails on both topics. 

There’s also important homework for everyone who attended. OSA CON 2023 showed you how open source can deliver fast, flexible, cost-efficient insight for users. Here is our challenge to every attendee.  Use your new knowledge to create something amazing. Build your next analytic application on open source. Then come back next year and tell us how it went!

The OSA CON 2024 call for papers opens in July. See you soon.

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