Administrative Techniques to Reduce Kafka Costs

When your Kafka clusters start growing so is the cost associated with them. As administrators we have to ensure that the service we support is operating in the most reliable way to satisfy the customers. However, for our business it is as important that we ensure the same service is also cost-efficient. There are two ways we can optimize the cost of service – tuning broker machines and tuning the data transfers. Minimizing data transfer is the largest return on investment since that is what accounts for the most spend. With the use of Kafka administrative tools and metrics we can find multiple ways to reduce the data transfers in the clusters. The presentation will cover various techniques administrators of Kafka service can employ to reduce the data transfers and to save the operational costs. Reducing cross-AZ traffic, optimizing batching with use of DumpLogSegment script, utilizing Kafka metrics to shut down unused data streams and more. With an objective of making our Kafka deployment as cost effective as possible, we have gained money saving tricks. And we would love to share them with the community.