Tips, Techniques, and Common Pitfalls Debugging Kafka

What if you could trace Kafka messages across your entire system without writing a single line of code?

#1about 1 minute

Understanding Kafka's role in modern architectures

Kafka acts as the architectural glue for distributed services, connecting different application components for real-time data processing.

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Real-world Kafka use cases at scale

Major companies like Netflix, Uber, and LinkedIn leverage Kafka for real-time analytics, trip data aggregation, and fraud prevention.

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Comparing Kafka with MQTT for IoT scenarios

While both are messaging protocols, Kafka offers low latency with rich messages, whereas MQTT provides faster throughput with a smaller footprint for IoT devices.

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Getting started with Kafka in Python

A look at available Python libraries for Kafka and the basic code structure for creating a message producer and consumer.

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Analyzing a complex Kafka architecture at Netflix

A breakdown of how Netflix uses Kafka at its core to handle massive traffic and orchestrate microservices when a user presses play.

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Common challenges of running Kafka at scale

Scaling Kafka introduces complexities in load balancing, resource management, data replication, and monitoring logs across distributed services.

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Solving monitoring challenges with OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry provides a vendor-neutral framework for distributed tracing, making it easier to visualize application flow and pinpoint errors without manual log analysis.

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Simplifying OpenTelemetry deployment without code changes

Lumigo's one-click OpenTelemetry solution uses operators and layers to automatically instrument applications in Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS Lambda.

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Live demo setup for debugging Kafka

The demo architecture consists of a Docker network running three Kafka instances and a Python Flask application acting as both producer and consumer.

#10about 7 minutes

Executing the live demo and analyzing traces

The demo shows how to send and receive messages, and then uses a distributed tracing tool to investigate a performance issue in real time.

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Key takeaways for building scalable systems

Final advice emphasizes building for scale, leveraging OpenTelemetry for monitoring, contributing to open source, and tracing all application components.