Tick-Tock with Kafka: Building Scalable Timer Functionality for Microservices

Timers are a cornerstone of any software system, yet traditional implementations often rely on in-memory solutions or RDBMS dependencies. In this talk, I’ll present a unique approach that leverages Kafka alone to power timer functionality—eliminating the need for RDBMS and embracing a distributed architecture. Using Kafka Streams, I’ll demonstrate how to efficiently schedule delayed work at web scale, enabling resilient and scalable microservices.