ApacheCon North America 2015: where friends meet

I have had a great pleasure to attend ApacheCon NA 2015 this year, which took place in the city of Austin, TX. By all means, it was an awesome conference and there are some emerging trends and interesting ideas I would like to share in this post.

ApacheCon is somewhat different from any other conference out there. And the main difference is the diversity of projects and topics being presented. It is a strength and a weakness in the same time: companies prefer to send people to specialized conferences which are dedicated to particular area / technology (good examples of those are Strata, JavaOne, SpringOne, ...). From other side, such a diversity encourages communication where often a new endless ideas are born. I personally have had a whole bunch of terrific conversations and met a lot of great people whom I can proudly refer as my friends now.

Getting closer to the matter, this time the conference had a 7 parallel tracks squeezed into 3 full days. The vast majority of the talks were about big/fast data and containerization / cloud deployment. It was clear that people are very interested in those topics as mostly every big data talk gathered quite a numerous crowd. Among the "big names" I have seen guys from Cloudera, Red Hat, Google, eBay, Pivotal and Linkedin.

There were a lot of brilliant talks but there are a couple of them which I was able to attend and would like to mention in particular:

• Andrew Kennedy gave a nice talk about Using Apache Brooklyn and Docker to Simulate your Production Environments in the Cloud
• Stephen Watt showed the way of Building Clustered Applications with Kubernetes and Docker
• Connor Doyle talked about Cracking the Container Scale Problem With Apache Mesos
• Muralidhar Sortur explained how to use Elastic Compute for Batch Platform Using Apache Mesos, Docker
• Andrea Turli revealed How to Create a Docker Cloud with Brooklyn, jclouds and clocker
• Jun Rao gave a very profound Introduction to Apache Kafka picked up by Todd Palino in his talk Kafka at Scale: Multi-Tier Architectures
• Alex Heneveld presented Apache Brooklyn: from YAML Blueprints to Autonomic Management
• Colin McCabe nicely dug into Introducing Apache HTrace: An End-to-End Tracing Framework for Distributed Systems
• Michael Bolz did a deep dive into Apache Olingo - From Incubation to a Real Olingo (Apache TLP)
• Sergey Beryozkin did an awesome job show-casting Practical JOSE Security for HTTP Services with Apache CXF

I was very lucky to give a talk Apache CXF, Tika and Lucene: The Power of Search the JAX-RS Way as well where I presented a very interesting combination of Apache CXF, Apache Tika, Apache Lucene and Apache Olingo working together to quickly integrate search capabilities into new or existing web APIs.

And last but not least, I have discovered that Luke project, very well-known tool in the Apache Lucene community, is looking for contributors to help to support it and move it forward. If you are interested, please join.

Huge thank you to Apache Software Foundation for organizing such a great conference this year and giving me the chance to attend it. Keep up doing this terrific work guys!