Effective Kafka: A Hands-on Guide to Building Robust and Scalable Event-Driven Applications with Code Examples in Java

by Emil Koutanov

The software architecture landscape has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Microservices have displaced monoliths. Data and applications are increasingly becoming distributed and decentralised. But composing disparate systems is a hard problem. More recently, software practitioners have been rapidly converging on event-driven architecture as a sustainable way of dealing with complexity — integrating systems without increasing their coupling.In Effective Kafka, Emil Koutanov explores the fundamentals of Event-Driven Architecture — using Apache Kafka — the world's most popular and supported open-source event streaming platform.You'll • The fundamentals of event-driven architecture and event streaming platforms• The background and rationale behind Apache Kafka, its numerous potential uses and applications• The architecture and core concepts — the underlying software components, partitioning and parallelism, load-balancing, record ordering and consistency modes• Installation of Kafka and related tooling — using standalone deployments, clusters, and containerised deployments with Docker• Using CLI tools to interact with and administer Kafka classes, as well as publishing data and browsing topics• Using third-party web-based tools for monitoring a cluster and gaining insights into the event streams• Building stream processing applications in Java 11 using off-the-shelf client libraries• Patterns and best-practice for organising the application architecture, with emphasis on maintainability and testability of the resulting code• The numerous gotchas that lurk in Kafka's client and broker configuration, and how to counter them• Theoretical background on distributed and concurrent computing, exploring factors affecting their liveness and safety• Best-practices for running multi-tenanted clusters across diverse engineering teams, how teams collaborate to build complex systems at scale and equitably share the cluster with the aid of quotas• Operational aspects of running Kafka clusters at scale, performance tuning and methods for optimising network and storage utilisation• All aspects of Kafka security —including network segregation, encryption, certificates, authentication and authorization.The coverage is progressively delivered and carefully aimed at giving you a journey-like experience into becoming proficient with Apache Kafka and Event-Driven Architecture. The goal is to get you designing and building applications. And by the conclusion of this book, you will be a confident practitioner and a Kafka evangelist within your organisation — wielding the knowledge necessary to teach others.

Genres: Technology, Computer Science, Software, Engineering, Nonfiction

458 pages, Paperback

Published March 18, 2020

Reviews

[Łukasz Słonina · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books on Kafka. You would not only learn how to use Kafka, but how it works under the hood, how to use it optimally. Definitely mandatory for all software engineers and architects using Kafka in their daily work (or planning to use, or just wanting to learn more). Detailed and practical chapter on Kafka security. Overall material is densely packed (few paragraphs I had to read multiple times), but there is enough theory and practice to support topics explanation. Well deserved 5 stars.

[Roman Mkrtchian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book covers Kafka in great detail, with all the essential elements for configuring it properly as an administrator, and also using it properly as a developer, including common pitfalls to avoid.

It has solid theoretical parts about how each component functions, as well as practical parts to follow like a tutorial. I personally attempted to navigate it using the Node.js client (thus realizing all the missing features compared to the Java one), and I would say using or knowing Java is not really a prerequisite to get significant value from the book.

On the downsides, sometimes the book's vocabulary can be challenging, especially for non-native English speakers. Additionally, it mainly covers the core parts of Kafka, and not the wider event streaming ecosystem, even though I guess it may have needed 200 or 300 more pages to do so. And I think I would also have liked a bit more detailed comparison with MQ-style message brokers.

[William Yip · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were mispelled and missing words throughout. The book did not have an index or a reference section. That said, the author was gave a very thorough treatment with plentiful code snippets and program logging regarding architecture, configuration, design, security and quotes, and other important aspects of Kafka.

[Ivan Ivanov · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I started to dig into Kafka I found two books that I thought it would help me - this one and "Kafka: The Definitive Guide". I started with the latter and that moved to this one.

The book has some good chapters that I really liked, but overall I found "Kafka: The Definitive Guide" to provide more value per page than this one.

[Prashant]

This is a boring book . Author should know how to deliver a technical topic in normal language . Don’t recommend.