I work as a Big data software engineer, I mostly go to AWS Summit or GCP Next. I feel like these conferences are more pushing their products (which is understandable) than giving new & interesting information about advances in the field. Any recommendations on conferences I should attend?
Disclaimer: I am an oreilly author and have spoken at both hadoop summit at strata multiple times.<p>Generally: Your luck with the above mentioned conferences are going to be mixed. There's a ton more biased content towards machine learning now.<p>Spark summit and flink forward might be better for you. Those are more systems focused:
<a href="http://sf.flink-forward.org/" rel="nofollow">http://sf.flink-forward.org/</a>
<a href="https://spark-summit.org/" rel="nofollow">https://spark-summit.org/</a><p>There's also kafka summit:
<a href="https://kafka-summit.org/" rel="nofollow">https://kafka-summit.org/</a>
I had good luck with
Hadoop World - <a href="https://conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata-ca" rel="nofollow">https://conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata-ca</a> and
Hadoop Summit (now branded as Dataworks Summit) - <a href="https://dataworkssummit.com/san-jose-2017/sponsors/" rel="nofollow">https://dataworkssummit.com/san-jose-2017/sponsors/</a><p>They're both pretty big and not as technically deep as smaller ones could be, but they make up for it with multiple tracks (ops, security, dev, business) and a breadth of technologies represented.
<a href="https://www.bigdataspain.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bigdataspain.org/</a> Madrid in November this year.<p>Last year's line up <a href="https://www.bigdataspain.org/2016/program" rel="nofollow">https://www.bigdataspain.org/2016/program</a><p><a href="http://apachecon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://apachecon.com/</a> has big data tracks but of course pushes the (many many) projects under the Apache umbrella.