Kafka Design Patterns with Gwen Shapira

Kafka is at the center of modern streaming systems. Kafka serves as a database, a pubsub system, a buffer, and a data recovery tool. It’s an extremely flexible tool, and that flexibility has led to its use as a platform for a wide variety of data intensive applications.

Today’s guest is Gwen Shapira, a product manager at Confluent. Confluent is a company that was started by the creators of Apache Kafka–Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede, and Jun Rao, who have all been on the show in previous episodes. In those shows, we discussed the inner workings of Kafka. This episode is more about practical use cases and design patterns.

Gwen explores a few use cases. First, reconciling data between different servers. A massive, international, multi-user game like World of Warcraft needs to keep its users in sync despite the fact that those users are pinging different server locations. Kafka can help reconcile data between the multiple servers. This discussion reminded me of the awesome show we did with Yan Cui about scalable multiplayer games.

Other examples we discussed include log management, data enrichment, and large scale analytics. It was a great conversation and I think you will enjoy it as well.

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Transcript

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