LinkedIn Kafka with Nacho Solis (Repeat)

Originally published October 18, 2019

Apache Kafka was created at LinkedIn. Kafka was open sourced in 2011, when the company was eight years old. By that time, LinkedIn had developed a social network with millions of users. LinkedIn’s engineering team was building a range of externally facing products and internal tools, and many of these tools required a high-throughput system for publishing data and subscribing to topics.

Kafka was born out of this need. Over time, Kafka’s importance within LinkedIn has only grown. Kafka plays a central role for services, log management, data engineering, and compliance. LinkedIn might be the biggest user of Apache Kafka in the entire software industry. Kafka has many use cases, and it is likely that they are almost all on display within LinkedIn.

Nacho Solis is a senior software engineering manager at LinkedIn, where he helps teams build infrastructure for Kafka, as well as Kafka itself. Nacho joins the show to discuss the history of Kafka at LinkedIn, and the challenges of managing such a large deployment of Kafka. We also talk about streaming, data infrastructure, and more general problems in the world of engineering management.

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Transcript

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