🎉 ElasticFR Meetup #100: 13 years of meetups

When I started the ElasticFR meetup group back in 2013, I had no idea we would reach this milestone. What began as a small gathering of curious developers exploring a new search engine has grown into one of the most active Elastic user groups in the world, with over 150 recorded talks on our YouTube playlist , tracking the technical evolution and enterprise adoption of the Elastic Stack across French-speaking companies.

Today, as we gather at BNP Paribas for this special 100th meetup, it’s time to look back at this incredible journey. Shay Banon - the founder of Elasticsearch - was originally planned to join us, but unfortunately couldn’t make it. We’re honored to have Frédéric Maussion, long-time supporter of the French community, stepping in to run a very nice demo about the new features of Elasticsearch 9.3 (not released yet).

The origin story: a recipe for success 👨‍🍳

If you’ve ever attended an Elasticsearch talk with Shay Banon, you’ve probably heard the story: Elasticsearch was born from a recipe search application he was building for his wife. A simple, loving project that would eventually revolutionize how businesses handle search, logging, and data analytics.

One hundred meetups later, we’re discussing real-time anomaly detection and AI agents at some of Europe’s largest banks. The journey from kitchen recipes to enterprise AI is quite something!

Exclusive content 🔥🔥🔥

At meetup #01 at Zenika , Shay Banon kicked things off with a session about sizing Elasticsearch in front of 100+ attendees.

And then we have been super lucky as a community to hear, often for the very first time in the world about new features and technologies. And just to name a few (there’s much more than that!):

• 2013 (Zenika): Uri Boness introducing the new Aggregations framework he was working on for Elasticsearch 1.0
• 2016 (Deezer): Rashid Khan (creator of Kibana) demoed for the very first time his work on TimeLion
• 2016 (Canal+): Mark Harwood deep-dived on the new graph capabilities he was working on
• 2016 (Younited Credit): Aaron Mildenstein presented the new version of Elasticsearch Curator
• 2017 (OnePoint): Jim Ferenczi on Field Collapsing, a feature that was not released at the time
• 2018 (Meritis): I shared the Elasticsearch module for Testcontainers project I created
• 2020 (Online): Sébastien Guilloux on his work on Elastic Cloud for Kubernetes
• 2020 (Online): Tanguy Leroux shared his great work on Searchable Snapshots
• 2022 (Peritis): Adrien Grand on ES|QL . Even the name of this great feature was not known outside Elastic
• 2022 (Peritis): Shay Banon on Stateless Elasticsearch , months before the Serverless product became an offer on Elastic Cloud
• 2023 (Scaleway): Sylvain Juge on his work on Java application logs and APM
• 2024 (Microsoft): Florian Lehner on Universal Profiling which was a very brand new feature at the time. It has now been donated to the OTel community
• 2024 (Google): Aurélien Foucret shared his actual development work on Learning To Rank - LTR
• 2025 (Zenika): Valentin Crettaz on the preview of AutoOps
• 2025 (Criteo): Sylvain Wallez explained what he is currently trying with Arrow, Pandas and ES|QL
• 2025 (Criteo): Laurent Saint-Félix on the Elasticsearch CLI project he built during his space time

Also, I’m always givng an update when we start every meetup with some exclusive informations with what the team is building at the moment, what has been released, what is coming next, etc. This part is not recorded which gives a bit of uniqueness to the meetup and exclusive content for the attendees.

The numbers 📊

The numbers speak for themselves: we have had 100 meetups and 185 talks over the years. With incredible talks from our community. And actually, most of the talks were given by the community, for the community.

And because that involvment is priceless, we are investing a lot in the meetup video recording and production (around 1.3k€ per meetup). Thanks to our sponsors who are generously supporting this effort.

Look for example at the quality before (the content is great but the video is not):

And now (both the content and the video are great):

If you look at what’s happening in the backend to make this possible, you will notice that we have multiple cameras, multiple microphones, and a professional video production setup provided by Alkoda On Air .

That way, we can share with the rest of the community what we are doing, specifically in France 🇫🇷.

A diverse community, French at heart 🌍

While ElasticFR is proudly French-speaking, our community has attracted speakers from around the world. Most of those talented persons were coming from France 🇫🇷, but we have also had speakers from Europe 🇪🇺 and the United States 🇺🇸. And some of them gave their talk in French despite the fact that they are not native French speakers.

I’m also very proud that even if the tech community is not very diverse yet, we have been lucky to listen to talented speakers like:

• Marie-Elise Lecoq was among our very first speakers in 2013 about “Le portail français du GBIF” (meetup #04)
• Yanxiu Li presented Elasticsearch en analyse comportementale des internautes at meetup #24
• Jeanne Le Garrec spoke about NLP Plugins for Elasticsearch at meetup #26
• Margaux Wagner presented A2 le moteur qui sublime Elasticsearch at meetup #31
• Galla Topalian presented DISHAS astronomy data at meetup #41
• Laetitia Richard presented FSCrawler at meetup #59
• Khadidja Messaoudi about Modeling reservations in Elasticsearch at meetup #79
• Mandy Andress - Securing the Elastic Way at meetup #83
• Anne L’Hôte shared insights on percolation for data alignment at meetup #88
• Lucia Cerchie presented Visualizing Realtime Stock Data with Streamlit, Apache Kafka and Apache Flink at meetup #97
• Yui Mikuriya is going to give a talk on building secure, agent-powered intelligence at meetup #100

I’m meeting a lot of people in the IT but lot of them are hesitating to speak in public. There’s like a glass ceiling mixed with the imposter syndrome which is preventing it to happen. So message to everyone who is using Elasticsearch, whatever your gender, your origin or your background are:

The ElasticFR community is always warmly welcoming speakers who are willing to share their knowledge and experiences with the community.

Don’t be shy. It will be always a success. And don’t think you won’t share interesting content. After 13 years at Elastic , I’m always learning a thing at every single talk.

Apply now! The CFP is always opened .

The hosts who made it possible 🏢

A meetup needs a venue, and we’ve been incredibly fortunate to have 40+ companies open their doors over the years:

A big thank you to all the hosts with a special thank you to the ones who supported us multiple times and sponsored the video recording! We could not have done it without you! And if you want to be (again) a future host, please contact me and we will discuss the details.

Today: meetup #100 at BNP Paribas 🏦

For this landmark event, we’re honored to gather at BNP Paribas (Bivwak!, 3 Rue Rossini, Paris) with an exceptional program:

• Frédéric Maussion - Agent Builder and Workflows
• Guillaume Nocent & Jean Daniel Zoro - Troubleshooting and planning performance at scale in BNP Paribas
• Yui Mikuriya - Responsible AI with Microsoft & Elastic: building secure, agent-powered intelligence

Even though Shay couldn’t join us this time, the spirit of that first meetup lives on. Frédéric Maussion is no stranger to our community - he has already spoken at ElasticFR meetups in the past, and his presence at meetup #100 shows Elastic’s continued commitment to the French-speaking community.

Thank you! 🙏

To everyone who made these 100 meetups possible:

• The 150+ speakers who took time to share their knowledge with the community 💡
• The 40+ hosts who provided venues and sponsored catering 🍻🍕 and video recordings 🎬
• The attendees who attended over the years with the same passion and curiosity 🤝
• My devrel team at Elastic who is giving me the needed budget and specifically Adrienne Vries for managing all the logistics to make the meetups possible 📦
• Alkoda On Air for providing high quality recordings 🎥
• Elastic for building always evolving pieces of software and sponsoring the meetups 💚
• Special thanks to Shay Banon for writing this lovely piece of software which is Elasticsearch and his support over the years 🎉

Here’s to the next 100 meetups! 🥂

Want to watch our recorded sessions? Check out the ElasticFR YouTube playlist with over 150 videos documenting the technical evolution and enterprise adoption of the Elastic Stack.

Want to join us? Follow the ElasticFR meetup group for upcoming events!