Nowdays, IT system become complex. Do I need yet another messaging system for my long tech stack? We will see how Kafka compares to traditional messaging systems, what's inside and how to use in java stack.

1. Kafka
Introduction to Apache Kafka
Kaunas JUG
Saulius Tvarijonas · saulius.tvarijonas@gmail.com

2. Who is this person?
Saulius Tvarijonas - saulius.tvarijonas@gmail.com
● VP of Software Development @ CUJO
● 20 years of java experience
● Area of Interest
○ Distributed Systems
○ Big Data
○ Performance optimizations
○ DevOps

3. What is CUJO?
● CUJO is a smart firewall that keeps your connected home safe
● Security
● Parental Control
● Big Data & Machine Learning based protection
www.getcujo.com

4. Agenda
● History
● Concepts
● Efficiency
● Development
● Operations

5. History
● Originally developed by LinkedIn
● Open sourced in early 2011
● Authors founded Confluent company
● Latest version 0.10.1.1
● Scala + Java

6. Positioning
● Distributed streaming platform
● Merge queue and publish-subscribe concepts
● Between JMS and log aggregation systems

7. Concepts
● Kafka is run as a cluster on one or more servers
● The Kafka cluster stores streams of records in
categories called topics
● Each topic divided into one or more partitions
● Each record consists of a key, a value, and a timestamp

8. Topic
Each partition is an ordered, immutable sequence of records that is continually appended to—a structured commit log.
Logs are rotated and deleted based on policy configuration.

9. Producers & Consumers
Offsets are controlled by consumer. Just a number (very cheap).

10. Partition
● Allow the log to scale beyond a size that will fit on a single server
● Act as the unit of parallelism

11. Replication
● Topics can (and should) be replicated
● Unit of replication is partition
● Each partition has 1 leader and 0 or more
replicas
● ISR = In-Sync Replica

12. Replication

13. Durability Guarantees
● Options
○ Do not wait for ACK
○ Wait for ACK from leader
○ Wait for ACK from all ISRs
● Disable unclean leader election
● Specify a minimum ISR size

14. Replica Management
● One broker elected as controller
● ZooKeeper used for metadata and coordination
● Rebalancing, rebalancing, rebalancing...

15. Message Delivery Semantics
● At most once — Messages may be lost but are never redelivered.
● At least once — Messages are never lost but may be redelivered.
● Exactly once — this is what people actually want, each message is
delivered once and only once.

16. Log Compaction

17. Streams
● Simple and lightweight client library
● Transparently handles the load balancing of multiple instances
● Fault-tolerant local state
● Time based window operations
● Map, Filter, Join, ...

18. Serialization
JSON, Avro, Protobuf, Thrift, XML?

19. Compression
● Compression at topic level
● Compressed by producer in batches
● Codecs
○ Gzip
○ Snappy
○ Lz4

20. Message Format
1. 4 byte CRC32 of the message
2. 1 byte "magic" identifier to allow format changes, value is 0 or 1
3. 1 byte "attributes" identifier to allow annotations on the message independent of the version
bit 0 ~ 2 : Compression codec.
0 : no compression
1 : gzip
2 : snappy
3 : lz4
bit 3 : Timestamp type
0 : create time
1 : log append time
bit 4 ~ 7 : reserved
4. (Optional) 8 byte timestamp only if "magic" identifier is greater than 0
5. 4 byte key length, containing length K
6. K byte key
7. 4 byte payload length, containing length V
8. V byte payload

21. Use Cases
● Messaging System (ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ)
● Storage System
● Stream Processing (Storm, Samza, Spark)
● Log Aggregation (Scribe, Flume)
● Metrics

22. Efficiency
● Main reasons for high throughput and low latency
○ Batch of individual messages
○ Zero copy I/O using sendfile()
○ Heavily relies on Linux PageCache

23. Performance

24. Development - API
● Producer API
● Consumer API
● Streams API
● Connect API

25. Development
● Spring-kafka
● Spring Integration Kafka
● Spring Boot

26. Operations
● Command line
● JMX monitoring
● Kafka Manager
● ZooKeeper cluster

27. Mirroring data between clusters
● Provide a replica in another datacenter
● Different number of partitions
● Order by key is preserved, but offset different
● Do not use as fault-tolerance mechanism

28. Java Forever
Thank
You!