Staging Reactive Data Pipelines Using Kafka as the Backbone

A while ago, I made a presentation on staging reactive data pipelines with Kafka. Here’s the video and the slides from the talk presented at Reactive Summit 2016. I also presented the same talk at the Skills Matter conference µCon 2016.

Kafka has become the de facto platform for reliable and scalable distribution of high-volumes of data. However, as a developer, it can be challenging to figure out the best architecture and consumption patterns for interacting with Kafka while delivering quality of service such as high availability and delivery guarantees. It can also be difficult to understand the various streaming patterns and messaging topologies available in Kafka.

In this talk, we present the patterns we’ve successfully employed in production and provide the tools and guidelines for other developers to choose the most appropriate fit for given data processing problem. The key points for the presentation are: patterns for building reactive data pipelines, high availability and message delivery guarantees, clustering of application consumers, topic partition topology, offset commit patterns, performance benchmarks, and custom reactive, asynchronous, non-blocking Kafka driver.