Cassandra / Kafka Support in EC2/AWS.

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Cassandra and Kafka Support on AWS/EC2

Cloudurable Support around Cassandra

Introduction to Kafka
and Kafka running in EC2
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Cassandra / Kafka Support in EC2/AWS

Kafka Introduction Kafka messaging

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What is Kafka?

❖ Distributed Streaming Platform

❖ Publish and Subscribe to streams of records
❖ Fault tolerant storage
❖ Process records as they occur
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Kafka Usage
❖ Build real-time streaming data pipe-lines
❖ Enable in-memory microservices (actors, Akka, Vert.x,
Qbit)
❖ Build real-time streaming applications that react to
streams
❖ Real-time data analytics
❖ Transform, react, aggregate, join real-time data flows
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Kafka Use Cases

❖ Metrics / KPIs gathering
❖ Aggregate statistics from many sources
❖ Even Sourcing
❖ Used with microservices (in-memory) and actor systems
❖ Commit Log
❖ External commit log for distributed systems. Replicated
data between nodes, re-sync for nodes to restore state
❖ Real-time data analytics, Stream Processing, Log Aggregation,
Messaging, Click-stream tracking, Audit trail, etc.
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Who uses Kafka?

❖ LinkedIn: Activity data and operational metrics
❖ Twitter: Uses it as part of Storm – stream processing
infrastructure
❖ Square: Kafka as bus to move all system events to various
Square data centers (logs, custom events, metrics, an so
on). Outputs to Splunk, Graphite, Esper-like alerting
systems
❖ Spotify, Uber, Tumbler, Goldman Sachs, PayPal, Box, Cisco,
CloudFlare, DataDog, LucidWorks, MailChimp, NetFlix,
etc.
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Kafka: Topics, Producers, and Consumers

Kafka Consumer
record Cluster
Producer
Consumer
Producer Topic
record
Producer
Consumer
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Kafka Fundamentals
❖ Records have a key, value and timestamp
❖ Topic a stream of records (“/orders”, “/user-signups”), feed name
❖ Log topic storage on disk
❖ Partition / Segments (parts of Topic Log)
❖ Producer API to produce a streams or records
❖ Consumer API to consume a stream of records
❖ Broker: Cluster of Kafka servers running in cluster form broker. Consists on many
processes on many servers
❖ ZooKeeper: Does coordination of broker and consumers. Consistent file system
for configuration information and leadership election
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Kafka Performance details

❖ Topic is like a feed name “/shopping-cart-done“, “/user-signups", which Producers write to and Consumers read from
❖ Topic associated with a log which is data structure on disk
❖ Producer(s) append Records at end of Topic log
❖ Whilst many Consumers read from Kafka at their own cadence
❖ Each Consumer (Consumer Group) tracks offset from where they left off reading
❖ How can Kafka scale if multiple producers and consumers read/write to the same Kafka Topic log?
❖ Sequential writes to filesystem are fast (700 MB or more a second)
❖ Kafka scales writes and reads by sharding Topic logs into Partitions (parts of a Topic log)
❖ Topics logs can be split into multiple Partitions different machines/different disks
❖ Multiple Producers can write to different Partitions of the same Topic
❖ Multiple Consumers Groups can read from different partitions efficiently
❖ Partitions can be distributed on different machines in a cluster
❖ high performance with horizontal scalability and failover
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Kafka Fundamentals 2
❖ Kafka uses ZooKeeper to form Kafka Brokers into a cluster
❖ Each node in Kafka cluster is called a Kafka Broker
❖ Partitions can be replicated across multiple nodes for failover
❖ One node/partition’s replicas is chosen as leader
❖ Leader handles all reads and writes of Records for partition
❖ Writes to partition are replicated to followers (node/partition pair)
❖ An follower that is in-sync is called an ISR (in-sync replica)
❖ If a partition leader fails, one ISR is chosen as new leader
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ZooKeeper does coordination for Kafka Consumer and Kafka

Cluster
ZooKeeper

Kafka Broker Consumer

Producer Kafka Broker
Kafka Broker Consumer
Producer Consumer
Topic
Producer
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Replication of Kafka Partitions 0

Record is considered "committed"
when all ISRs for partition wrote to their log
ISR = in-sync replica Leader Red
Client Producer
Only committed records are Follower Blue
readable from consumer
1) Write record

Kafka Broker 0 Kafka Broker 1 Kafka Broker 2

2) Replicate 2) Replicate
record record
Partition 0 Partition 0 Partition 0

Partition 1 Partition 1 Partition 1

Partition 2 Partition 2 Partition 2

Partition 3 Partition 3 Partition 3

Partition 4 Partition 4 Partition 4

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Replication of Kafka Partitions 1

Leader Red
Client Producer
Another partition can be owned
by another leader on another Kafka broker
Follower Blue

1) Write record

Kafka Broker 1
Kafka Broker 0 Kafka Broker 2

Partition 0 Partition 0 Partition 0

2) Replicate 2) Replicate
record record
Partition 1 Partition 1 Partition 1

Partition 2 Partition 2 Partition 2

Partition 3 Partition 3 Partition 3

Partition 4 Partition 4 Partition 4

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Kafka Extensions

❖ Streams API to transform, aggregate, process records

from a stream and produce derivative streams
❖ Connector API reusable producers and consumers (e.g.,
stream of changes from DynamoDB)
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Kafka Connectors and Streams

Connectors

DB DB

Consumers
Producers
App
Kafka
App
Cluster App
App
App
App
App App

Streams
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Kafka Polyglot clients / Wire protocol

❖ Kafka communication from clients and servers wire

protocol over TCP protocol
❖ Protocol versioned
❖ Maintains backwards compatibility
❖ Many languages supported
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Topics and Logs

❖ Topic is a stream of records
❖ Topics stored in log
❖ Log broken up into partitions and segments
❖ Topic is a category or stream name
❖ Topics are pub/sub
❖ Can have zero or many consumer groups (subscribers)
❖ Topics are broken up into partitions for speed and size
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Topic Partitions
❖ Topics are broken up into partitions
❖ Partitions are decided usually by key of record
❖ Key of record determines which partition
❖ Partitions are used to scale Kafka across many servers
❖ Record sent to correct partition by key
❖ Partitions are used to facilitate parallel consumers
❖ Records are consumed in parallel up to the number of
partitions
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Partition Log
❖ Order is maintained only in a single partition
❖ Partition is ordered, immutable sequence of records that is continually appended to—a structured
commit log
❖ Producers write at their own cadence so order of Records cannot be guaranteed across partitions
❖ Producers pick the partition such that Record/messages goes to a given same partition based on the data
❖ Example have all the events of a certain 'employeeId' go to same partition
❖ If order within a partition is not needed, a 'Round Robin' partition strategy can be used so Records are
evenly distributed across partitions.
❖ Records in partitions are assigned sequential id number called the offset 
❖ Offset identifies each record within the partition
❖ Topic Partitions allow Kafka log to scale beyond a size that will fit on a single server
❖ Topic partition must fit on servers that host it, but topic can span many partitions hosted by many servers
❖ Topic Partitions are unit of parallelism - each consumer in a consumer group can work on one partition at a
time
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Kafka Topic Partitions Layout

Partition
0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Partition
1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Writes
Partition
2 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Partition 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
3

Older Newer
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Kafka Record retention

❖ Kafka cluster retains all published records

❖ Time based – configurable retention period

❖ Size based

❖ Compaction

❖ Retention policy of three days or two weeks or a month

❖ It is available for consumption until discarded by time, size or

compaction

❖ Consumption speed not impacted by size

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Kafka Consumers / Producers

Producers

Partition
0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Consumer Group B

Consumer Group A

Consumers remember offset where they left off.

Consumers groups each have their own offset.

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Kafka Partition Distribution

❖ Each partition has leader server and zero or more follower
servers

❖ Leader handles all read and write requests for partition

❖ Followers replicate leader, and take over if leader dies
❖ Used for parallel consumer handling within a group

❖ Partitions of log are distributed over the servers in the Kafka cluster
with each server handling data and requests for a share of
partitions

❖ Each partition can be replicated across a configurable number of

Kafka servers

❖ Used for fault tolerance

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Kafka Producers
❖ Producers send records to topics

❖ Producer picks which partition to send record to per topic

❖ Can be done in a round-robin

❖ Can be based on priority

❖ Typically based on key of record

❖ Kafka default partitioner for Java uses hash of keys to
choose partitions, or a round-robin strategy if no key
❖ Important: Producer picks partition
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Kafka Consumer Groups

❖ Consumers are grouped into a Consumer Group 

❖ Consumer group has a unique id

❖ Each consumer group is a subscriber

❖ Each consumer group maintains its own offset

❖ Multiple subscribers = multiple consumer groups

❖ A Record is delivered to one Consumer in a Consumer Group

❖ Each consumer in consumer groups takes records and only one
consumer in group gets same record

❖ Consumers in Consumer Group load balance record

consumption
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Kafka Consumer Groups 2

❖ How does Kafka divide up topic so multiple Consumers in a consumer
group can process a topic?
❖ Kafka makes you group consumers into consumers group with a group id
❖ Consumer with same id belong in same Consumer Group
❖ One Kafka broker becomes group coordinator for Consumer Group
❖ assigns partitions when new members arrive (older clients would talk
direct to ZooKeeper now broker does coordination)
❖ or reassign partitions when group members leave or topic changes
(config / meta-data change
❖ When Consumer group is created, offset set according to reset policy of topic
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Kafka Consumer Group 3

❖ If Consumer fails before sending commit offset XXX to Kafka broker,
❖ different Consumer can continue from the last committed offset
❖ some Kafka records could be reprocessed (at least once behavior)
❖ "Log end offset" is offset of last record written to log partition and where Producers write to
next
❖ "High watermark" is offset of last record that was successfully replicated to all partitions
followers
❖ Consumer only reads up to the “high watermark”. Consumer can’t read un-replicated data
❖ Only a single Consumer from the same Consumer Group can access a single Partition
❖ If Consumer Group count exceeds Partition count:
❖ Extra Consumers remain idle; can be used for failover
❖ If more Partitions than Consumer Group instances,
❖ Some Consumers will read from more than one partition
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2 server Kafka cluster hosting 4 partitions (P0-P5)

Kafka Cluster

Server 1 Server 2

P2 P3 P4 P0 P1 P5

C0 C1 C3 C0 C1 C3

Consumer Group A Consumer Group B

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Kafka Consumer Consumption

❖ Kafka Consumer consumption divides partitions over consumer instances

❖ Each Consumer is exclusive consumer of a "fair share" of partitions

❖ Consumer membership in group is handled by the Kafka protocol

dynamically

❖ If new Consumers join Consumer group they get share of partitions

❖ If Consumer dies, its partitions are split among remaining live

Consumers in group

❖ Order is only guaranteed within a single partition

❖ Since records are typically stored by key into a partition then order per
partition is sufficient for most use cases
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Kafka vs JMS Messaging

❖ It is a bit like both Queues and Topics in JMS
❖ Kafka is a queue system per consumer in consumer group so load
balancing like JMS queue
❖ Kafka is a topic/pub/sub by offering Consumer Groups which act
like subscriptions
❖ Broadcast to multiple consumer groups
❖ By design Kafka is better suited for scale due to partition topic log
❖ Also by moving location in log to client/consumer side of equation
instead of the broker, less tracking required by Broker
❖ Handles parallel consumers better
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Kafka scalable message storage

❖ Kafka acts as a good storage system for records/messages
❖ Records written to Kafka topics are persisted to disk and replicated to
other servers for fault-tolerance
❖ Kafka Producers can wait on acknowledgement
❖ Write not complete until fully replicated
❖ Kafka disk structures scales well
❖ Writing in large streaming batches is fast
❖ Clients/Consumers control read position (offset)
❖ Kafka acts like high-speed file system for commit log storage,
replication
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Kafka Stream Processing

❖ Kafka for Stream Processing

❖ Kafka enable real-time processing of streams.

❖ Kafka supports stream processor

❖ Stream processor takes continual streams of records from input topics, performs some
processing, transformation, aggregation on input, and produces one or more output
streams

❖ A video player app might take in input streams of videos watched and videos paused, and
output a stream of user preferences and gear new video recommendations based on recent
user activity or aggregate activity of many users to see what new videos are hot

❖ Kafka Stream API solves hard problems with out of order records, aggregating across
multiple streams, joining data from multiple streams, allowing for stateful computations,
and more

❖ Stream API builds on core Kafka primitives and has a life of its own
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Using Kafka Single Node

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Run Kafka

❖ Run ZooKeeper
❖ Run Kafka Server/Broker
❖ Create Kafka Topic
❖ Run producer
❖ Run consumer
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Run ZooKeeper
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Run Kafka Server

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Create Kafka Topic

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Kafka Producer
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Kafka Consumer
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Running Kafka Producer and Consumer

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Use Kafka to send and receive messages

Lab 1-A Use Kafka Use single server version of

Kafka
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Using Kafka Cluster

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Running many nodes

❖ Modify properties files

❖ Change port
❖ Change Kafka log location
❖ Start up many Kafka server instances
❖ Create Replicated Topic
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Leave everything from before running

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Create two new server.properties files

❖ Copy existing server.properties to server-1.properties,

server-2.properties
❖ Change server-1.properties to use port 9093, broker id 1,
and log.dirs “/tmp/kafka-logs-1”
❖ Change server-2.properties to use port 9094, broker id 2,
and log.dirs “/tmp/kafka-logs-2”
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server-x.properties
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Start second and third servers

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Create Kafka replicated topic my-failsafe-topic

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Start Kafka consumer and producer

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Kafka consumer and producer running

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Use Kafka Describe Topic

The leader is broker 0

There is only one partition
There are three in-sync replicas (ISR)
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Test Failover by killing 1st server

Use Kafka topic describe to see that a new leader was elected!

NEW LEADER IS 2!
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Use Kafka to send and receive messages

Lab 2-A Use Kafka Use a Kafka Cluster to

replicate a Kafka topic log
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Kafka Consumer and Working with producers and

consumers

Producers Step by step first example

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Objectives Create Producer and Consumer example

❖ Create simple example that creates a Kafka Consumer

and a Kafka Producer
❖ Create a new replicated Kafka topic
❖ Create Producer that uses topic to send records
❖ Send records with Kafka Producer
❖ Create Consumer that uses topic to receive messages
❖ Process messages from Kafka with Consumer
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Create Replicated Kafka Topic

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Build script
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Create Kafka Producer to send records

❖ Specify bootstrap servers

❖ Specify client.id
❖ Specify Record Key serializer
❖ Specify Record Value serializer
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Common Kafka imports and constants

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Create Kafka Producer to send records

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Send sync records with Kafka Producer

The response RecordMetadata has 'partition' where record was written and the 'offset' of the record.
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Send async records with Kafka Producer

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Create Consumer using Topic to Receive Records

❖ Specify bootstrap servers

❖ Specify client.id
❖ Specify Record Key deserializer
❖ Specify Record Value deserializer
❖ Specify Consumer Group
❖ Subscribe to Topic
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Create Consumer using Topic to Receive Records

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Process messages from Kafka with Consumer

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Consumer poll
❖ poll() method returns fetched records based on current
partition offset
❖ Blocking method waiting for specified time if no records
available
❖ When/If records available, method returns straight away
❖ Control the maximum records returned by the poll() with
props.put(ConsumerConfig.MAX_POLL_RECORDS_CON
FIG, 100);
❖ poll() is not meant to be called from multiple threads
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Running both Consumer and Producer

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Java Kafka simple example recap

❖ Created simple example that creates a Kafka Consumer
and a Kafka Producer
❖ Created a new replicated Kafka topic
❖ Created Producer that uses topic to send records
❖ Send records with Kafka Producer
❖ Created Consumer that uses topic to receive messages
❖ Processed records from Kafka with Consumer
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Kafka design Design discussion of Kafka

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Kafka Design Motivation

❖ Kafka unified platform for handling real-time data feeds/streams
❖ High-throughput supports high volume event streams like log aggregation
❖ Must support real-time analytics
❖ real-time processing of streams to create new, derived streams
❖ inspired partitioning and consumer model
❖ Handle large data backlogs - periodic data loads from offline systems
❖ Low-latency delivery to handle traditional messaging use-cases
❖ Scale writes and reads via partitioned, distributed, commit logs
❖ Fault-tolerance for machine failures
❖ Kafka design is more like database transaction log than a traditional messaging system
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Persistence: Embrace filesystem

❖ Kafka relies heavily on filesystem for storing and caching messages/records
❖ Disk performance of hard drives performance of sequential writes is fast
❖ JBOD configuration with six 7200rpm SATA RAID-5 array is about 600MB/sec
❖ Sequential reads and writes are predictable, and are heavily optimized by operating systems
❖ Sequential disk access can be faster than random memory access and SSD
❖ Operating systems use available of main memory for disk caching
❖ JVM GC overhead is high for caching objects whilst OS file caches are almost free
❖ Filesystem and relying on page-cache is preferable to maintaining an in-memory cache in the
JVM
❖ By relying on the OS page cache Kafka greatly simplifies code for cache coherence
❖ Since Kafka disk usage tends to do sequential reads the read-ahead cache of the OS pre-
populating its page-cache
Cassandra, Netty, and Varnish use similar techniques.
The above is explained well in the Kafka Documentation.
And there is a more entertaining explanation at the Varnish site.
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Long sequential disk access

❖ Like Cassandra, LevelDB, RocksDB, and others Kafka uses a
form of log structured storage and compaction instead of an
on-disk mutable BTree
❖ Kafka uses tombstones instead of deleting records right away
❖ Since disks these days have somewhat unlimited space and
are very fast, Kafka can provide features not usually found in
a messaging system like holding on to old messages for a
really long time
❖ This flexibility allows for interesting application of Kafka
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Kafka compression
❖ Kafka provides End-to-end Batch Compression
❖ Bottleneck is not always CPU or disk but often network bandwidth
❖ especially in cloud and virtualized environments
❖ especially when talking datacenter to datacenter or WAN
❖ Instead of compressing records one at a time…
❖ Kafka enable efficient compression of a whole batch or a whole message set or message
batch
❖ Message batch can be compressed and sent to Kafka broker/server in one go
❖ Message batch will be written in compressed form in log partition
❖ don’t get decompressed until they consumer
❖ GZIP, Snappy and LZ4 compression protocols supported

Read more at Kafka documents on end to end compression.

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Kafka Producer Load Balancing

❖ Producer sends records directly to Kafka broker partition
leader
❖ Producer asks Kafka broker for metadata about which
Kafka broker has which topic partitions leaders - thus no
routing layer needed
❖ Producer client controls which partition it publishes
messages to
❖ Partitioning can be done by key, round-robin or using a
custom semantic partitioner
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Kafka Producer Record Batching

❖ Kafka producers support record batching
❖ Batching is good for efficient compression and network IO throughput
❖ Batching can be configured by size of records in bytes in batch
❖ Batches can be auto-flushed based on time
❖ See code example on the next slide
❖ Batching allows accumulation of more bytes to send, which equate to few larger I/
O operations on Kafka Brokers and increase compression efficiency
❖ Buffering is configurable and lets you make a tradeoff between additional latency
for better throughput
❖ Or in the case of an heavily used system, it could be both better average
throughput and
QBit a microservice library uses message batching in an identical fashion as Kafka
to send messages over WebSocket between nodes and from client to QBit server.
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More producer settings for performance

For higher throughput, Kafka Producer allows buffering based on time and size.
Multiple records can be sent as a batches with fewer network requests.
Speeds up throughput drastically.
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Stay tuned

❖ More to come
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References
❖ Learning Apache Kafka, Second Edition 2nd Edition by
Nishant Garg (Author), 2015, ISBN 978-1784393090, Packet
Press
❖ Apache Kafka Cookbook, 1st Edition, Kindle Edition by
Saurabh Minni (Author), 2015, ISBN 978-1785882449, Packet
Press
❖ Kafka Streams for Stream processing: A few words about how
Kafka works, Serban Balamaci, 2017, Blog: Plain Ol' Java
❖ Kafka official documentation, 2017