Simplifying Event Streaming: Tools for Location Transparency and Data Evolution

Kafka Summit 2016 | Systems Track

At Under Armour Connected Fitness, we’ve built an event streaming platform on top of Kafka and the Confluent stack that makes it easy for developers to produce and consume schema-based events without requiring direct knowledge of Kafka. We are constantly trying to improve the developer experience. The platform consists of multiple federated Kafka clusters, a schema registry, a topology service, an archiver and specialized client libraries and Web / CLI tools that assist developers with producer and consumer workflows.

In this talk, we will take a deeper dive into the design and implementation of a Scala/Java implementation of our client library that allows developers to produce or consume events without worrying about the underlying infrastructure and their location while enjoying the benefits of data compatibility through schemas. We’ll also look at an HTTP based client proxy that exposes the same API but for languages without our native support. Finally, we’ll walk through Web and CLI tools we built to make working with the platform easier.

The content of this talk will be primarily aimed at software developers looking for ideas on how to build Kafka client tools that allow producer/consumer interactions protected by schema-based event definitions while hiding details of the underlying infrastructure.