SFSpark.org: Let's talk SMACK: Meet the SMACK Stack Experts Panel Discussion

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Scale By the Bay 2019 is held on November 13-15 in sunny Oakland, California, on the shores of Lake Merritt: https://scale.bythebay.io. Join us! ----- Let's talk some SMACK! Join us for a fantastic evening with some of the experts of the SMACK stack technologies. What is the SMACK stack and why is it important? In today’s always-connected economy, businesses need to provide real-time services to customers that utilize vast amounts of data. Successful businesses are changing how they build applications—from monolithic architectures to cloud native architectures: distributed systems of microservices, containers, and data services. The SMACK stack is a common combination of technologies to build data-rich applications. It is composed of Apache Spark (batch/stream processing), Mesosphere / Apache Mesos (cluster manager), AKKA (JVM based actor framework), Apache Cassandra (storage layer), and Apache Kafka (message queue). For this meetup, we'll be doing things a little differently and running it like a live reddit AMA (ask me anything). We'll have a panelist of experts from the technologies in the SMACK stack to answer any and all questions you may have, so please come prepared with some good questions! Panelists: • Neil Conway: Neil Conway is an engineer at Mesosphere, and an Apache Mesos Committer and PMC Member. At Mesosphere, he has worked on a variety of projects, including partition-aware Mesos frameworks and improving support for stateful Mesos frameworks. Prior to joining Mesosphere, he completed a PhD in…