Kafka

Combining Reactive Streams, Heroku Kafka, and Play Framework

Heroku recently announced early access to the new Heroku Kafka service and while I’ve heard great things about Apache Kafka I hadn’t played with it because I’m too lazy to set that kind of stuff up on my own. Now that I can setup a Kafka cluster just by provisioning a Heroku Addon I figured it was time to give it a try.

If you aren’t familiar with Kafka it is kinda a next generation messaging system. It uses pub-sub, scales horizontally, and has built-in message durability and delivery guarantees. Originally Kafka was built at LinkedIn but is now being used by pretty much every progressive enterprise that needs to move massive amounts of data through transformation pipelines.