Folks, THIS is Apache Kafka

On day one of Green Bay Packers’ training camp each season, legendary coach Vince Lombardi stood before his team holding a “pigskin” and said: “Gentlemen, THIS is a football.” This highlights the importance of the basic fundamentals of any subject. In an ecosystem like Apache Kafka, it’s imperative that we understand the pieces and parts that compose this “highly scalable event streaming platform.”

In this session, let’s (re)introduce ourselves to the components of Apache Kafka. We’ll start with terminology like topics, partitions, producers and consumers - basic “blocking and tackling.” Along the way we’ll delve into how each is related and significant to the others. We’ll also take a high-level look at “special teams” aspects of the Apache Kafka ecosystem for data governance, connecting to external systems, and event processing.

I’m no Vince Lombardi. But you’ll walk away from this session with a basic understanding of how Kafka does what it does, as well as a curiosity to explore Kafka as a useful and powerful tool in your application architecture.