标签：#kafka

Netflix is moving toward the open-source Apache Flink Autoscaler for more than 30,000 streaming jobs across multiple AWS regions. The operator-level approach addresses limitations of Netflix’s cluster level autoscaler for complex, stateful pipelines. Netflix reports a 58% reduction in annualized Flink compute expenditure for one team, saving approximately $1.1 million annually. By Leela Kumili

Most guides for connecting Spark to Amazon MSK assume the two live in the same cloud and authenticate with IAM. That covers a lot of cases. It does not cover the one that keeps showing up in large enterprises: the Kafka cluster is in AWS, the compute is Azure Databricks, IAM is off the table because the identity system is a corporate PKI, and the traffic never touches the public internet. This walks through that setup end to end. Certificates from a private CA, a private network path between the two clouds, and a Structured Streaming job that actually keeps running on a multi-node cluster instead of only on the driver. Why mTLS instead of IAM MSK offers four authentication modes: plaintext, TLS with client certificates, SASL/SCRAM, and IAM. IAM is the easiest and the best choice when your consumers run in AWS. Cross-cloud, IAM stops being convenient. Azure Databricks executors have no AWS identity. You can bolt one on with OIDC federation and assumed roles, but in most regulated enterprises the decision has already been made elsewhere: there is a corporate PKI, every service-to-service hop uses client certificates issued from it, and the security architecture review is going to ask why this one connection is different. mTLS is the path of least resistance, not the clever choice. One important constraint before you start. MSK will only accept client certificates issued by an AWS Private CA (ACM PCA) that is associated with the cluster. If your corporate PKI is not that CA, you have two options: stand up an ACM PCA subordinate signed by your corporate root, or issue the Databricks client certificate from a dedicated ACM PCA and treat it as a separate trust domain. The subordinate route is usually what security wants, and it takes longer to get approved than everything else in this article combined. Start that conversation first. Network path Three ways to get private connectivity between an Azure VNet and an AWS VPC: Site-to-site VPN. IPsec tunnel between an Azure VPN

You have an orders topic on a Kafka cluster, its values encoded with Avro against a schema in the Schema Registry . You want the orders worth more than fifty euros on a topic of their own, and you have decided to do it with Kafka Streams — a JVM library, your code, your deployment. The schema has five fields: { "type" : "record" , "name" : "Order" , "namespace" : "com.alginte.demo" , "fields" : [ { "name" : "orderId" , "type" : "string" }, { "name" : "customerId" , "type" : "string" }, { "name" : "item" , "type" : "string" }, { "name" : "quantity" , "type" : "int" }, { "name" : "priceEur" , "type" : "double" }]} You want one line of logic over them: quantity * priceEur > 50 . Here is everything standing between that line and a topic of big orders. Seven steps The route Confluent's own examples take, and many projects with them: Get the schema out of the registry and into your repository as an .avsc — or, if your team owns the schema in the repository and publishes it to the registry, the other way round. Whichever copy you call the source, there are now two that can disagree. Add the code generator to your build. Configure it — source and output directories, and the string type. Build , producing Order.java under target/generated-sources . Write the topology against the generated class. Package the application, with the schema, the class and the serde. Deploy it somewhere that runs a JVM. Steps 2 and 3 are this, once — in Maven, though Gradle's equivalent has the same shape: <plugin> <groupId> org.apache.avro </groupId> <artifactId> avro-maven-plugin </artifactId> <version> 1.12.1 </version> <executions><execution> <phase> generate-sources </phase> <goals><goal> schema </goal></goals> <configuration> <sourceDirectory> ${project.basedir}/src/main/avro </sourceDirectory> <!-- without this, string fields generate as CharSequence, not String; Confluent's own examples set it for the same reason --> <stringType> String </stringType> </configuration> </execution></executio

The bug that doesn't show up in tests — and what to do about it There is a class of bug in event-driven systems that is almost invisible in development and devastating in production: publishing a message to Kafka for data that never actually reached the database. It doesn't crash. It doesn't throw. The Kafka message goes out, the consumer picks it up, and it tries to process a batch that doesn't exist. Depending on your retry and error handling strategy, this can cascade silently for a long time before anyone notices. The fix is simple. The reason most people don't apply it is that the problem isn't obvious until you've seen it. The Problem: Publishing Inside the Transaction The intuitive approach is to publish to Kafka as part of the same transactional method: @Transactional public void process ( SettlementWindow window , LocalDate today , Participant participant ) { // ... FileBatch savedBatch = batchPort . save ( batch ); orderPort . updateStatusBatch ( orders ); // Publishes BEFORE the transaction commits publisherPort . publish ( savedBatch ); } This looks safe. The transaction is still open, the data is there, everything is consistent — until the transaction rolls back. If anything fails after publish() — another database update, a constraint violation, an unexpected exception — Spring rolls back the transaction. The database returns to its previous state. But Kafka already received the message. There is no rollback for Kafka. The consumer now holds a reference to a FileBatch that does not exist in the database. This is a phantom message . The Fix: afterCommit() Spring's TransactionSynchronizationManager provides a hook that fires after the transaction has successfully committed: @Transactional ( propagation = Propagation . REQUIRES_NEW ) public void process ( SettlementWindow window , LocalDate today , Participant participant ) { // ... FileBatch savedBatch = batchPort . save ( batch ); orderPort . updateStatusBatch ( orders ); // Kafka fires only after the d

Scaling Kafka Consumers in Spring Boot: How We Cut Lag and Saved Latency When scaling high-throughput event-driven microservices in fintech, default Spring Kafka consumer configurations often run into throughput limits under peak loads. Here is the exact production setup we engineered to resolve consumer lag and reduce API processing latency by 35%. 1. Concurrency Tuning Over Single-Threaded Listeners By default, @KafkaListener operates with concurrency = 1. When a partition receives high message volume, processing gets backlogged. @Configuration @EnableKafka public class KafkaConsumerConfig { @Bean public ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory < String , PaymentEvent > kafkaListenerContainerFactory ( ConsumerFactory < String , PaymentEvent > consumerFactory ) { ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory < String , PaymentEvent > factory = new ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory <>(); factory . setConsumerFactory ( consumerFactory ); factory . setConcurrency ( 6 ); // Matches number of partition splits factory . getContainerProperties (). setAckMode ( ContainerProperties . AckMode . MANUAL_IMMEDIATE ); return factory ; } } 2. Explicit Batch Processing and Idempotency Instead of committing offset per message, processing batches with manual acknowledgments ensures atomic handling: @Service public class PaymentEventConsumer { @KafkaListener ( topics = "payment.settlement.v1" , containerFactory = "kafkaListenerContainerFactory" ) public void consume ( ConsumerRecord < String , PaymentEvent > record , Acknowledgment ack ) { try { processPayment ( record . value ()); ack . acknowledge (); } catch ( Exception ex ) { log . error ( "Failed processing record key: {}" , record . key (), ex ); // Route to Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) handleDeadLetter ( record ); ack . acknowledge (); } } } 3. Key Takeaway Scaling Kafka consumer pipelines requires matching topic partition count with container concurrency, tuning database connection pools and implementing dead letter queues for fail

In this article, author Srikanth Mamidala discusses the data lake architecture used for analytics, reporting, and machine learning and shows how to manage the consumer lag metrics when using Kafka and Apache Hudi. By Srikanth Mamidala

A practical guide to building reliable event-driven systems in Go using Apache Kafka. Learn how to implement tiered retry strategies with delayed reprocessing, route permanently failed messages to dead letter queues in Golang with Sarama. Prerequisites What do you need to follow along? Working knowledge of Golang. Go & Docker installed on your PC. What is an Event-Driven Architecture? An Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) is a design approach where services communicate by producing and responding to events. Each service operates independently, producing or reacting to events as they happen. What are Events? An event is a record of something that has happened in a system, typically representing a state change or a significant action. An event contains data (payload) describing what happened. An example of an event could be: A user signing up for a service. A user placing an order in your system. Components of an Event-Driven Architecture To understand how events flow through a system, we need to know three key players: Event Producers : They are the sources of events. They generate and publish events like signup events, order placed events, etc. Producers generate events and transmit them to the rest of the system. They do not know who is listening for or handling the events. Event Brokers : They sit between producers and consumers, decoupling them so neither needs a direct connection to the other. Brokers receive event messages, maintain their chronological order, make them available for consumption, and route them to the right consumers. Apache Kafka is an example of an event broker, and it's the one we'll use throughout this guide. Event Consumers : They handle the processing tasks. They listen on event channels and react when an event they are subscribed to is published, then they process the event, which can include making API calls, updating a database, triggering other events, or logging information. The Complete Flow With those three pieces in place, the flow of

The textbook version of the transactional outbox is tight. You save the domain entity and an outbox row in one local transaction. A background scheduler picks up PENDING rows and publishes them to Kafka. You never publish inside the request thread — no dual-write, no atomicity breach. The pattern closes the consistency gap. Then you load-test it. I ran 1,000 authenticated requests through my event-driven platform in 70 seconds. The gateway returned 201 for every one of them. The outbox absorbed every row. The consumer drained everything. By every visible metric the system looked healthy. Underneath that health, I found three production-grade problems the textbook never mentioned. What a correct implementation looks like Before the problems, the shape of the solution. The outbox publisher runs on a @Scheduled virtual-thread worker: @Scheduled ( fixedDelay = 5000 ) @Transactional public void publishPendingEvents () { List < OutboxEvent > batch = outboxRepository . findTop20ByStatusOrderByCreatedAtAsc ( OutboxStatus . PENDING ); for ( OutboxEvent event : batch ) { event . setStatus ( OutboxStatus . PROCESSING ); outboxRepository . save ( event ); try { kafkaTemplate . send ( event . getTopic (), event . getPayload ()). get (); event . setStatus ( OutboxStatus . PUBLISHED ); } catch ( Exception e ) { event . incrementRetryCount (); if ( event . getRetryCount () >= MAX_RETRIES ) { event . setStatus ( OutboxStatus . FAILED ); } else { event . setStatus ( OutboxStatus . PENDING ); } } outboxRepository . save ( event ); } } This is correct. The PROCESSING state prevents another scheduler instance from claiming the same row. The retry cap prevents infinite cycling. The PENDING fallback on transient errors gives the event another chance. The dual-write problem is genuinely closed. Here is what that correctness does not cover. Gap 1: Your throughput ceiling is a config line fixedDelay = 5000 means the scheduler runs every 5 seconds. findTop20 means it picks up 20 rows per cycl

How we turned always-on Kafka sinks into on-demand workers that shrug off nightly bombardments — by scaling on the right signal, tuning per-pod drain rate, and keeping autoscaling from sabotaging itself. Every number in this post is measured from a local lab you can run yourself — the full code is on GitHub , and the Appendix has the commands. The problem We run a fleet of Kafka sinks — consumer services that read change events from Kafka, apply business logic, and write the result into a service-local database as a query-friendly materialized view. It keeps reads fast and independent from upstream systems, and it's a great pattern. But the workload has an awkward shape. Most sinks are idle most of the day, then buried in minutes. Traffic isn't steady: changes arrive in bursts, usually from nightly imports or CDC jobs. The rest of the day the topic is quiet. topic activity over 24h msgs ▲ │ ██ nightly import / CDC burst │ ██ │______________██______________ flat, idle ~22h/day └───────────────────────────────▶ time That shape creates two problems at once : Idle waste. When the topic is quiet, each sink still runs — it polls Kafka, holds connections, emits metrics, and occupies CPU and memory. Multiply one "small" sink across dozens of them and several regions, and you're paying around the clock for work that happens for a couple of hours a night. Spike lag. When the burst lands, a backlog builds fast. If consumers can't drain it quickly enough, consumer lag — the gap between what's been produced and what's been processed — climbs, and downstream reads start serving stale data. We want two things that sound contradictory: cost almost nothing when idle , and absorb the spike fast when it hits. Why the obvious autoscaler doesn't help The reflex is a Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) on CPU or memory. For sinks, that's the wrong signal. Sink work is I/O-bound : the consumer spends its time waiting on Kafka polls and database writes, not burning CPU. So when a ba

I thought this would be a simple task. I already had a Python Kafka producer running. Kafka was up in Docker. The topic existed, and I could send a message into it successfully. The next step sounded straightforward: Python Producer ↓ Kafka ↓ Spark Structured Streaming All I wanted Spark to do was read a JSON message from a Kafka topic. Instead, I ran into one error after another. At first, it looked like one problem: Spark cannot read Kafka. It was not one problem. It turned into a chain of failures across several different layers: Python / PySpark ↓ Spark runtime ↓ Kafka connector ↓ Hadoop / Windows ↓ Docker ↓ Kafka networking ↓ Ivy dependency resolution The useful part of this experience was not any single fix. It was learning how to separate the layers and stop treating every error as a problem in my Python code. This is the full debugging path. What I Was Building This was part of an financial data engineering project. The batch side of the project already looked roughly like this: Financial Data Source ↓ Python ingestion ↓ AWS S3 ↓ Snowflake ↓ dbt ↓ Financial anomaly models I wanted to add a streaming extension for newly arriving financial events. For the first version, I kept it intentionally simple: Python Kafka Producer ↓ Kafka topic: financial_events ↓ Spark Structured Streaming The producer sent a simulated financial event: { "company_id" : "COMPANY_001" , "company_name" : "Sample Company" , "report_type" : "quarterly_report" , "reporting_date" : "2026-08-08" , "event_id" : "FIN-20260808-001" , "source" : "simulated_financial_event" } Kafka accepted the message successfully. I could even read it with Kafka's console consumer. So Kafka itself was working. Then Spark entered the picture. Failure #1: PySpark Worked, but spark-submit Didn't I installed PySpark: pip install pyspark Then I installed Java 17 and verified it: java -version After reopening my terminal, Java was available. I tested Spark directly through Python: python -c "from pyspark.sql import S

You put a lot of work into authentication. A gateway validates the Keycloak JWT, maps realm roles to authorities, checks that the caller is allowed. By the time a request reaches your service, you know exactly who is calling. Then the request crosses into async land, and all of that evaporates. This is the story of the point where identity quietly disappears in an event-driven system, why the dead-letter queue is the worst possible place for it to disappear, and how I made the acting user as durable and replay-safe as the event itself. The flow everyone believes is fine The platform is a set of Spring Boot services: an API gateway in front, a user-service on MySQL, a notification-service on PostgreSQL, and Kafka carrying events between them. A user is created, an event is published, a notification is sent. Authentication is handled at the edge. The gateway is an OAuth2 Resource Server; it validates the token once and propagates the caller's identity downstream as headers: // api-gateway — IdentityPropagationFilter (@Order(2), after security) IdentityContext identity = identityContextExtractor . extract ( jwt ); // Always set all three headers (empty when absent) to mask any spoofed values. enrichedRequest . putHeader ( IdentityHeaders . USER_NAME , nullToEmpty ( identity . username ())); enrichedRequest . putHeader ( IdentityHeaders . USER_EMAIL , nullToEmpty ( identity . email ())); enrichedRequest . putHeader ( IdentityHeaders . USER_ROLES , identity . rolesAsString ( DELIM )); One detail here matters more than it looks. The headers are always overwritten , even when a claim is absent. If a client tries to inject X-User-Name: admin on the inbound request, the gateway stomps it with the validated value (or empty). Downstream trust in those headers is only safe because the perimeter guarantees they cannot be forged. Miss that, and you've built an impersonation API. So far, so good. The synchronous hop carries identity. The problem starts one line later. The hidden f

You attach the OpenTelemetry Java agent, point it at a collector, and within minutes Grafana is drawing a service map you never drew. A box for each service, arrows between them, latency on every edge. It feels like magic, and — more dangerously — it feels complete . "The agent traces everything" is the sentence repeated in every onboarding doc. This is the story of the moment that sentence stopped being true on my platform, why I'm glad it did, and the difference between a system that is working and a system you can actually see . The flow everyone trusts The platform is an event-driven set of Spring Boot services: an API gateway in front, a user-service backed by MySQL, a notification-service backed by PostgreSQL, and Kafka carrying events between them. A user is created, an event is published, a notification is sent. I didn't want to draw that topology. A hand-drawn architecture diagram is documentation that drifts — true the day you commit it, slightly wrong a month later, actively misleading after a quarter. I wanted the dependency graph generated from live traffic , so it would always reflect what the system actually does. Grafana Tempo does exactly this. Its service-graphs processor reads matched client/server span pairs out of trace data and emits a metric — traces_service_graph_request_total — that Grafana renders as a node graph. No edge is ever wired by hand. The topology is derived, continuously, from real spans. The edge that wasn't there I generated the graph and the synchronous edges lit up immediately: api-gateway → user-service user-service → MySQL notification-service → PostgreSQL Then I looked for the one edge I actually cared about — user-service → notification-service , the asynchronous hop over Kafka. It wasn't there. The naive conclusion (and why it's wrong) The tempting read is immediate and obvious: the async hop is broken. The event isn't getting across. Go debug the consumer. So I checked. And the consumer was completely fine. notification

In modern Data Engineering, there is an unspoken fetish for "Real-Time." If you ask any business stakeholder how fast they need their dashboard to update, the default answer will always be: "As fast as possible." This drives well-intentioned engineers to design incredibly complex architectures. We spin up Kafka clusters, implement Flink, and wrestle with latency, late-arriving data, and tumbling windows. All to have data flowing in milliseconds. But the harsh reality is that the vast majority of companies are building Ferraris just to sit in rush-hour traffic. 1. The Actionability Gap (The Golden Question) The biggest mistake when choosing a streaming architecture isn't technical; it's a business mistake. Before implementing real-time pipelines, the only question that matters is: "Does the company have the operational capacity to make a decision in milliseconds?" If you are building a credit card fraud detection system or a live e-commerce recommendation engine, yes, every millisecond counts. But if the data is feeding a financial dashboard that the executive board only reviews during their Monday morning meeting, updating that screen every second is a colossal waste of money and effort. Real-time data has zero value if the human action is batch. 2. The Hidden Complexity and the Cloud Bill Batch processing is forgiving. If a pipeline fails at 3 AM, you trigger a rerun, and by 8 AM, everything is fine. Batch is cheap, predictable, and easy to debug. Streaming, on the other hand, is unforgiving. Handling application state, event duplication (exactly-once semantics), out-of-order events, and sudden traffic spikes requires a senior engineering team dedicated solely to keeping the infrastructure alive. Furthermore, the cloud bill for 24/7 continuous processing is orders of magnitude higher than spinning up your compute clusters on a schedule. 3. "Micro-Batch" Solves 99% of Your Problems There is a perfect middle ground that the hype industry tries to ignore: the micro-ba

By Swetha Golla · 8 min read · Senior Application Architect 🔗 This post has a live interactive version with a clickable per-service verdict and the full comparison matrix: read it here TL;DR Need strict per-key ordering and replay? That's a log, not a queue — Kinesis or MSK. Pick MSK if you need real Kafka wire-protocol compatibility (existing clients, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, Debezium); pick Kinesis if you'd rather AWS own shard mechanics and you're fine with its API. Need routing logic based on event content, not raw throughput? EventBridge — pattern-matching rules to many differently-interested targets, not identical delivery to everyone. Need a simple durable buffer between one producer and one consumer group? SQS. Need the same message fanned out to many independent subscribers? SNS — often paired with SQS underneath. Already running RabbitMQ, or need AMQP-specific routing? Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ is a lift-and-shift, not a rearchitecture. The expensive mistake isn't picking a slightly-suboptimal service — it's picking a queue when you needed a log, or the reverse. That's a rewrite, not a config change. The setup Scope note: this is a decision matrix for AWS's own catalog, not a survey of every messaging technology that exists. Self-hosted Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, Azure Service Bus, NATS, Pulsar, and plenty of others solve overlapping problems outside AWS's walls — worth knowing about, out of scope here. A platform team is replacing a single overloaded RabbitMQ broker that has become the answer to every "how do services talk to each other" question for three years running: order events, fraud signals, audit trails, third-party webhooks, and a slow-growing analytics pipeline all queue through it. It works, until it doesn't — a queue depth spike during a promotion in 2025 backed up every consumer behind it, including ones that had nothing to do with the promotion. The team's instinct is to "move it all to AWS-native," as one service. That instinct is the mistake. Thes

Video streaming has become a normal part of everyday life. Whether you are watching a live sports event, attending an online class, listening to internet radio, or enjoying a movie on a streaming platform, a complex technology system is working behind the scenes to deliver content smoothly. Most viewers simply press Play and start watching. They do not see the technology that makes videos load quickly, reduce buffering, and automatically adjust quality when internet conditions change. One of the most important technologies behind modern streaming is HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) . HLS is a widely used video streaming protocol that delivers high-quality audio and video across different devices and network conditions. Instead of sending one large video file, HLS divides content into smaller pieces called media segments and delivers them continuously while the viewer watches. For example, when a video automatically changes from 1080p to 720p during a slow internet connection without stopping completely, that experience is powered by Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR) , one of the main features of HLS. In this guide, you will learn: What HLS Streaming is How HTTP Live Streaming works Why Apple created the HLS protocol How M3U8 playlists control video delivery How media segments are created How Adaptive Bitrate Streaming improves playback Where HLS is commonly used How HLS compares with other streaming technologies Whether you are a beginner learning about video technology or a developer exploring streaming protocols, this guide explains HLS step by step. What Is HLS Streaming? HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is a video streaming protocol created by Apple that delivers audio and video content through standard HTTP and HTTPS connections. Unlike traditional video downloads, HLS does not send a complete video file at once. Instead, it breaks the content into many smaller parts called media segments and sends them one by one while the viewer is watching. This approach provides several a

Installing Apache Kafka 4.2 on Ubuntu 24.04 (WSL2) Using KRaft Mode: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide Learn how to install Apache Kafka 4.2 in KRaft mode, understand its architecture, create topics, produce and consume messages, and troubleshoot common configuration issues—all without ZooKeeper. 🚀 Introduction Apache Kafka has become the de facto standard for building event-driven , real-time , and high-throughput applications. Whether you're processing millions of financial transactions, collecting application logs, streaming IoT sensor data, or connecting microservices, Kafka provides a scalable and reliable messaging platform. Until recently, setting up Kafka required running Apache ZooKeeper alongside Kafka brokers. While powerful, ZooKeeper added operational complexity and introduced another distributed system that administrators had to manage. Beginning with recent Kafka releases, KRaft (Kafka Raft Metadata mode) removes this dependency by allowing Kafka to manage its own metadata internally. This makes installation simpler, reduces operational overhead, and improves scalability. In this guide, we'll install Apache Kafka 4.2 on Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS (WSL2) , configure a single-node KRaft cluster, and walk through the complete lifecycle: Installing Kafka Understanding the Kafka architecture Configuring KRaft mode Starting the broker Creating topics Producing and consuming messages Troubleshooting common issues Understanding the purpose of each configuration parameter Rather than simply listing commands, I'll explain why each step is necessary so that you understand how Kafka works under the hood. What is Apache Kafka? Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform designed to move data reliably and efficiently between applications. Instead of applications communicating directly with each other, they communicate through Kafka. A producing application writes messages to Kafka. Kafka stores those messages reliably. One or more consuming applications read those m

TL;DR Retailers process thousands of inventory transactions every second across physical stores, eCommerce platforms, warehouses, suppliers, and fulfillment centers. Yet many inventory systems still rely on scheduled synchronization, causing stock levels to become outdated within minutes. The result is overselling, delayed replenishment, inaccurate inventory visibility, and avoidable stockouts. Apache Kafka enables real-time inventory management by treating every inventory movement as an event that is streamed the moment it occurs. Sales, returns, warehouse transfers, supplier deliveries, and IoT sensor updates are continuously processed to maintain a consistent inventory view across all retail systems. This event-driven approach helps retailers improve inventory accuracy, automate replenishment, detect stockouts before they occur, and respond to changing demand in near real time. In this guide, you'll learn how Apache Kafka powers real-time inventory management, explore a production-ready reference architecture, understand how inventory events are processed across retail systems, and discover implementation best practices for building scalable, resilient inventory streaming applications. Introduction Retail inventory management has evolved far beyond tracking products on warehouse shelves. Today's retailers operate across physical stores, eCommerce platforms, online marketplaces, distribution centers, and supplier networks, where inventory levels change continuously throughout the day. Every sale, return, warehouse transfer, supplier delivery, and inventory adjustment impacts product availability, making accurate inventory visibility essential for delivering a seamless customer experience. However, many retailers still rely on scheduled synchronization between Point-of-Sale (POS) systems, Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms, and online storefronts. While these systems perform different functions, they all depend on accur

Redpanda is a Kafka-API-compatible streaming platform written in C++ with no JVM and no ZooKeeper. This guide installs Redpanda on Ubuntu 24.04, secures it with a Let's Encrypt certificate and SASL/SCRAM authentication, tunes the kernel for production, verifies with a producer/consumer test, and exposes Redpanda Console behind Nginx basic auth. By the end, you'll have a secured, production-tuned single-node Redpanda cluster with a web console. Prerequisite: Ubuntu 24.04 server sized per Redpanda's CPU/memory requirements , non-root sudo user, and a domain A record (e.g. redpanda.example.com ). Install Redpanda $ sudo apt update $ curl -1sLf 'https://dl.redpanda.com/nzc4ZYQK3WRGd9sy/redpanda/cfg/setup/bash.deb.sh' | sudo -E bash Warning: Only run vendor setup scripts you trust — piped curl | sudo bash runs with root privileges. $ sudo apt install redpanda -y $ rpk --version Open the Firewall Port Service Purpose 9092 Kafka API Producer/consumer traffic 8082 Pandaproxy (HTTP) REST access for non-Kafka clients 8081 Schema Registry Avro/Protobuf schema versioning 9644 Admin API Monitoring, config, health checks 33145 Internal RPC Inter-node communication $ sudo ufw allow 9092,8082,8081,9644,33145/tcp $ sudo ufw allow 80/tcp $ sudo ufw allow 443/tcp $ sudo ufw reload Issue a Let's Encrypt Certificate Redpanda ships with plaintext networking by default, fine for a lab, not for anything else. $ sudo apt install certbot -y $ DOMAIN = redpanda.example.com $ EMAIL = admin@example.com $ sudo certbot certonly --standalone -d $DOMAIN --non-interactive --email $EMAIL Certbot stores certs under /etc/letsencrypt/live , readable only by root. Redpanda runs as its own redpanda user, so copy the certs into a dedicated directory: $ sudo mkdir /etc/redpanda/certs $ sudo cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/ $DOMAIN /fullchain.pem /etc/redpanda/certs/node.crt $ sudo cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/ $DOMAIN /privkey.pem /etc/redpanda/certs/node.key $ sudo cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/ $DOMAIN /chain.pem /etc/re

Event-driven architecture promises scalability, but in Java-based real-time systems the tradeoffs only surface in production. Drawing on a Java/Kafka contact center platform handling 80k BHCC across 10k agents, this article details where the design breaks down—state management, partition limits, deduplication, JVM tuning, cascading consumer failures—and the Redis-backed patterns that fixed each. By Sagar Deepak Joshi

Most engineers don't think seriously about Kafka partitioning until something breaks in production. A topic that worked fine at low volume starts falling behind. Events that should be in order aren't. All of it traces back to a partitioning decision that was made quickly and never revisited. Why Partitioning Actually Matters Partitions are the unit of parallelism in Kafka. Every consumer in a group is assigned one or more partitions, and it processes those partitions alone. No two consumers in the same group share a partition. That means your partition count sets a hard ceiling on how many consumers can work in parallel: if you have 6 partitions, the 7th consumer in your group sits idle no matter how much load you're under. Partitioning also controls ordering. Within a single partition, events are strictly ordered. Across partitions, there are no guarantees. So how you distribute events across partitions determines what ordering guarantees your consumers can actually rely on. Get this wrong and you'll spend a long time debugging why events from the same user are being processed out of sequence. The partition key controls both of these things. It determines which partition an event lands in, and that decision has consequences that are expensive to reverse. Partitioning Strategies Partition by Key This is the most common strategy and the right default when ordering matters. You supply a key when producing an event, Kafka hashes it using the murmur2 algorithm, and takes the modulo against the partition count to decide where it lands. producer . send ( ' orders ' , key = b ' user_4821 ' , value = event ) Every event with the same key always lands in the same partition. That's what guarantees ordering within a key. All events for user_4821 go to partition 3 (or wherever the hash resolves), and your consumer reads them in the exact sequence they were produced. I default to this for almost everything I build now and only go keyless when I have a specific reason to. Use key