Evolution of NRT Data Ingestion Pipeline at Trendyol

Trendyol, Turkey's leading e-commerce company, is committed to positively impacting the lives of millions of customers. Our decision-making processes are entirely driven by data. As a data warehouse team, our primary goal is to provide accurate and up-to-date data, enabling the extraction of valuable business insights.

We utilize the benefits provided by Kafka and Kafka Connect to facilitate the transfer of data from the source to our analytical environment. We recently transitioned our Kafka Connect clusters from on-premise VMs to Kubernetes. This shift was driven by our desire to effectively manage rapid growth(marked by a growing number of producers, consumers, and daily messages), ensuring proper monitoring and consistency. Consistency is crucial, especially in instances where we employ Single Message Transforms to manipulate records like filtering based on their keys or converting a JSON Object into a JSON string.

Monitoring our cluster's health is key and we achieve this through Grafana dashboards and alerts generated through kube-state-metrics. Additionally, Kafka Connect's JMX metrics, coupled with NewRelic, are employed for comprehensive monitoring.

The session will aim to explain our approach to NRT data ingestion, outlining the role of Kafka and Kafka Connect, our transition journey to K8s, and methods employed to monitor the health of our clusters.