We’re excited to announce that Google will host and organize HBaseCon West 2017, the official conference for the Apache HBase community on June 12. Registration for the event in Mountain View, CA is free and the call for papers (CFP) is open through April 24. Seats are limited and the CFP closes soon, so act fast.

Apache HBase is the original open source implementation of the design concepts behind Bigtable, a critical piece of internal Google data infrastructure which was first described in a 2006 research paper and earned a SIGOPS Hall of Fame award last year. Since the founding of HBase, its community has made impressive advances supporting massive scale with enterprise users including Alibaba, Apple, Facebook, and Visa. The community is fostering a rich and still-growing ecosystem including Apache Phoenix, OpenTSDB, Apache Trafodion, Apache Kylin and many others.

Now that Bigtable is available to Google Cloud users through Google Cloud Bigtable, developers have the benefit of platform choices for apps that rely on high-volume and low-latency reads and writes. Without the ability to build portable applications on open APIs,  however, even that freedom of choice can lead to a dead end — something Google addresses through its investment in open standards like Apache Beam, Kubernetes and TensorFlow.

To that end, Google’s Bigtable team has been actively participating in the HBase community. We’ve helped co-author the HBase 1.0 API and have standardized on that API in Cloud Bigtable. This design choice means developers with HBase experience don’t need to learn a new API for building cloud-native applications, ensures Cloud Bigtable users have access to the large Apache Hadoop ecosystem and alleviates concerns about long-term lock-in.

We hope you’ll join us and the HBase community at HBaseCon West 2017. We recommend registering early as there is no registration available on site. As usual, sessions are selected by the HBase community from a pool reflecting some of the world’s largest and most advanced production deployments.

Register soon or submit a paper for HBaseCon — remember, the CFP closes on April 24! We look forward to seeing you at the conference.

By Carter Page and Michael Stack, Apache HBase Project Management Committee members