Insights from the Apache Beam Summit 2022 • Ahmet Altay

These are my thoughts, reflections, and insights from Beam Summit 2022.

Good planning and hard work made a dramatic difference. I was not one of the organizers however I worked very closely with most of the organizers in the past year. I have seen how much effort went into making this a highly successful event. Those people deserve the biggest credit.
The event had an amazing group of attendees. There were about 200 in-person attendees, and they were all extremely passionate about Beam. Most of the attendees had a technical background and they were part of the day-to-day Beam community. People knew about each other’s projects, and it was effortless to have discussions about how all these people and projects could come together to build something even larger.
Apache Beam is huge, Beam is important, Beam is impactful. Beam is the right tool for data processing. Lots of large companies (Twitter, LinkedIn, Spotify, HSBC, Palo Alto Networks, Orange, Intuit, and many more) are using Beam in production and using it to process enormous amounts of business-critical data.
I got the chance to meet with lots of new folks. It is exciting to see the number of people who have great ideas and who would like to contribute to Beam. People genuinely care about making Beam a successful project. I enjoyed meeting with everyone. For new OSS contributors, it is helpful to meet the people behind the mailing lists. And I am hoping that will translate into more contributors and a more vibrant and diverse community for Beam.
There was a wide variety of remarkably interesting talks. These will be all available online in the next few weeks. About a third of the talks were related to ML, there is an ever-growing interest in Beam ML. Other than ML, multi-language pipelines, growing IO ecosystem, and performance were other hot topics. I believe we will continue to see more developments in all these areas in the next year.
Austin is still a wonderful place to visit, lots of great food, lots of things to do, and downtown is walkable for the most part.

For the next year, Beam Summit 2023, I would hope to see more folks, especially more Beam users coming and sharing all sorts of ways they are using Beam. This is an amazing community to be part of and thanks to all for being part of Beam!