Michael Noll is a product manager at Confluent, the company founded by the creators of Apache Kafka. Previously Michael was the technical lead of the Big Data platform of .COM/.NET DNS operator Verisign, where he grew the Hadoop, Kafka, and Storm based infrastructure from zero to petabyte-sized production clusters spanning multiple data centers – one of the largest Big Data infrastructures operated from Europe at the time. He is a known tech blogger in the Big Data community (www.michael-noll.com) and serves as a technical reviewer for publishers such as Manning in his spare time. Michael has a Ph.D. in computer science and is an experienced speaker, having presented at international conferences such as ACM SIGIR, Web Science, and ApacheCon.