Real-Time Data and Messaging at Scale: Innovations with Flink, Kafka, and Beyond

Wix Engineering Meetup

Monday, February 17th, 17:30
Wix Campus

About our meetups

Join us for an exciting meetup focused on the latest innovations in real-time data processing and messaging systems at scale.

Whether you're a backend developer, data engineer, architect, or enthusiast, this will provide actionable insights, best practices, and inspiration to elevate your real-time systems to the next level.

Agenda

17:30 — 18:00

Gathering: Pizza & Beer

18:00 — 18:35

Ohad Israeli
Staff Solutions Engineer
Confluent

Apache Flink: Stream Processing for Real-Time Use Cases

In the session we will understand Flink's position as the compute layer within the data streaming stack.

They emphasize how processing data at ingest with Flink improves latency, data portability, and cost-effectiveness compared to downstream processing

18:35 - 19:10

Tal Sheldon
Backend Engineer, Data Engineering
Wix

Guy Levinhr
Backend Engineer, Data Engineering
Wix

Scaling a Real-Time Feature Store: Wix's Journey from Legacy to Innovation

Join Wix's data engineering team as they share how they built a robust real-time feature store that handles billions of daily events and manages over 3,000 features in near-realtime updates.

In this talk, we'll explore how Apache Flink, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, and Aerospike formed the backbone of this large-scale data pipeline, enabling efficient and reliable feature calculations across multiple services.

You'll gain practical insights into the challenges of scaling a real-time system, the architectural decisions guiding Wix's approach, and how Confluent Flink enables seamless real-time applications.

19:10 - 19:55

Or Ben Ari
Backend Engineer, Server Core
Wix

Revolutionizing Kafka: Messaging at Scale

Discover how Wix revolutionized its messaging infrastructure by transitioning from client-side Kafka consumers to a gRPC-based proxy architecture.

This innovation significantly reduced costs, improved scalability, and simplified developer workflows.

Learn about the robust Kafka ecosystem at Wix, featuring out-of-the-box tools for retries, dead letter queues, advanced monitoring, and cross-data-center replication.

This talk will provide actionable insights into designing efficient, developer-friendly messaging systems for modern microservices at scale.