Announcing Apache: Big Data and ApacheCon: Core

A year and a half ago, we forged a partnership with the Apache Software Foundation to become the producer of their official ASF events. The ASF has long blazed a trail of innovation in open source and our work with them has yielded results in successful developer collaboration and events. It’s been a great partnership, in our opinion, led on our side by my colleague Angela Brown.

We’re excited to announce a large change in the structure of the annual ApacheCon events in North America and Europe. After extensive research and discussions with the Apache Software Foundation community, ApacheCon will now consist of two co-located events, called Apache: Big Data, and ApacheCon: Core.

ApacheCon is a well-established event in the open source community. For more than a decade, these events have brought the Apache project community together to meet, network, learn and collaborate in order to improve the wide range of Apache projects. Now that the Apache project portfolio has grown to encompass so many different areas of open source software and technology, it has become apparent that offering a single event does not provide enough time or concentration of sessions to meet the needs of the various projects. There are simply too many great projects with too much happening to fit into a conference this size.

Starting this autumn in Budapest, we will now offer Apache: Big Data alongside ApacheCon: Core. Apache: Big Data will focus on Apache’s wide range of Big Data-focused projects, including Bigtop, Crunch, Falcon, Flink, Hadoop, Kafka, Parquet, Phoenix, Samza, Spark, Storm, Tajo, and more. In addition to the technical sessions that ApacheCon is known for, having an event dedicated to Big Data will enable Apache: Big Data to appeal to a broader range of attendees. While there will still be countless sessions for maintainers, committers, developers and engineers, new content will be added for SysAdmins and other users of Apache Big Data projects.

Sessions at Apache: Big Data will be selected by an impartial program committee consisting of the following members:

• Doug Cutting: Creator of Apache Hadoop, Apache Lucene, Co-creator of Apache Nutch, Chief Architect at Cloudera

• Owen O’Malley: Founding Chair of the Apache Hadoop Project Management Committee, Co-Founder of Hortonworks

• Roman Shaposhnik: Apache Bigtop Founder, Director of Open Source at Pivotal

• Reynold Xin: Apache Spark Project Management Committee Member, Co-founder of Databricks.

ApacheCon: Core will follow immediately after Apache: Big Data, giving those who wish to attend both events the opportunity to do so easily and affordably. ApacheCon: Core will provide space for sessions and mini-summits covering the range of other Apache projects, including those focused on the cloud and mobile, as well as a Web Technologies track, Incubator & Innovation track, and Community track. These sessions will be largely community-driven, with maintainers and other experts sharing their knowledge across a range of topics.

These changes will help make these events more relevant to everyone in the Apache community, and provide more opportunities than ever before to learn and share knowledge. If you have expertise you would like to share with the community, we encourage you to submit a speaking proposal for the Budapest events. Interested individuals can submit a session topic proposal for Apache: Big Data by July 10 at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-europe/program/cfp and ApacheCon: Core by July 1 at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-core-europe/program/cfp.