kafka
- Engineering
- Last Updated: December 19, 2017
- Jeff Chao
Designing scalable, fault tolerant, and maintainable stream processing systems is not trivial. The Kafka Streams Java library paired with an Apache Kafka cluster simplifies the amount and complexity of the code you have to write for your stream processing system. Unlike other stream processing systems, Kafka Streams frees you from having to worry about building and maintaining separate infrastructural dependencies alongside your Kafka clusters. However, you still need to worry about provisioning, orchestrating, and monitoring infrastructure for your Kafka Streams applications. Heroku makes it easy for you to deploy, run, and scale your Kafka Streams applications by using supported buildpacks…
- News
- Last Updated: September 14, 2017
- Rand Arete
Event-driven architectures are on the rise, in response to fast-moving data and constellations of inter-connected systems. In order to support this trend, last year we released Apache Kafka on Heroku – a gracefully integrated, fully managed, and carefully optimized element of Heroku's platform that is the culmination of years of experience of running many hundreds of Kafka clusters in production and contributing code to the Kafka ecosystem. Today, we are excited to announce additional plans and pricing in our Kafka offering in order to make Apache Kafka more accessible, and to better support development, testing, and low volume production needs.…
- Engineering
- Last Updated: January 11, 2017
- Tom Crayford
At Heroku, we're always working towards improving operational stability with the services we offer. As we recently launched Apache Kafka on Heroku, we've been increasingly focused on hardening Apache Kafka, as well as our automation around it. This particular improvement in stability concerns Kafka's compacted topics, which we haven't talked about before. Compacted topics are a powerful and important feature of Kafka, and as of 0.9, provide the capabilities supporting a number of important features. Meet the Bug The bug we had been seeing is that an internal thread that's used by Kafka to implement compacted topics (which we'll explain…
- News
- Last Updated: June 03, 2024
- Chris Castle
Heroku recently released [a managed Apache Kafka][1] offering. As a Node.js developer, I wanted to demystify Kafka by sharing a simple yet practical use case with the many Node.js developers who are curious how this technology might be useful. At Heroku we use Kafka internally for a number of uses including data pipelines. I thought that would be a good place to start. When it comes to actual examples, Java and Scala get all the love in the Kafka world. Of course, these are powerful languages, but I wanted to explore Kafka from the perspective of Node.js. While there are…
- News
- Last Updated: September 28, 2016
- Rand Arete
Many of the compelling and engaging application experiences we enjoy every day are powered by event-based systems; requesting a ride and watching its progress, communicating with a friend or large group in real time, or connecting our increasingly intelligent devices to our phones and each other. Behind the scenes, similar architectures let developers connect separate services into single systems, or process huge data streams to generate real-time insights. Together, these event-driven architectures and systems are quickly becoming a powerful complement to the relational database and app server models that have been at the core of Internet applications for over twenty…
- News
- Last Updated: June 03, 2024
- Tom Crayford
At Heroku, we're always working towards increased operational stability with the services we offer. As we recently launched the beta of Apache Kafka on Heroku, we've been running a number of clusters on behalf of our beta customers. Over the course of the beta, we have thoroughly exercised Kafka through a wide range of cases, which is an important part of bringing a fast-moving open-source project to market as a managed service. This breadth of exposure led us to the discovery of a memory leak in Kafka, having a bit of an adventure debugging it, and then contributing a patch…
- News
- Last Updated: July 19, 2016
- Scott Persinger
We recently launched Apache Kafka on Heroku into beta. Just like we do with Heroku Postgres, our internal engineering teams have been using our Kafka service to power a number of our internal systems. The Big Idea The Heroku platform comprises a large number of independent services. Traditionally we’ve used HTTP calls to communicate between these services. While this approach is simple to implement and easy to reason about, it has a number of drawbacks. Synchronous calls mean that the top-level request time will be gated by the slowest backend component. Also, internal API calls create tight point-to-point couplings between…
- Engineering
- Last Updated: June 03, 2024
- Tom Crayford
At Heroku, we're always striving to provide the best operational experience with the services we offer. As we’ve recently launched Heroku Kafka, we were excited to help out with testing of the latest release of Apache Kafka, version 0.10, which landed earlier this week. While testing Kafka 0.10, we uncovered what seemed like a 33% throughput drop relative to the prior release. As others have noted, “it’s slow” is the hardest problem you’ll ever debug, and debugging this turned out to be very tricky indeed. We had to dig deep into Kafka’s configuration and operation to uncover what was going…
- News
- Last Updated: April 24, 2024
- Rand Arete
Today we are happy to announce early access to Heroku Kafka. We think Kafka is interesting and exciting because it provides a powerful and scalable set of primitives for reasoning about, building, and scaling systems that can handle high volumes and velocities of data. Heroku Kafka makes Kafka more accessible, reliable, and easy to integrate into your applications. What is Kafka? Apache Kafka is a distributed commit log for fast, fault-tolerant communication between producers and consumers using message based topics. Kafka provides the messaging backbone for building a new generation of distributed applications capable of handling billions of events and…
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