Two-Layer Idempotency: Why Not Every Settlement System Needs an Outbox
A few weeks ago I published a write-up on inverting the control flow of a settlement API: instead of the endpoint owning window semantics (batching,…
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How Kafka Saved a Failing System -The Story of Arjun & Meera
Modern systems run on data in the form of fast, real-time, continuous streams. But what happens when your system grows faster than your architecture…
Building Fault-Tolerant, Event-Driven Kafka Pipelines in Go: Reliable Reprocessing & Dead Letter Queues
A practical guide to building reliable event-driven systems in Go using Apache Kafka. Learn how to implement tiered retry strategies with delayed re…
The Outbox Pattern Is Not Enough
The textbook version of the transactional outbox is tight. You save the domain entity and an outbox row in one local transaction. A background sched…
One bad Kafka record shouldn't crash a Flink Stateful Functions job
What was broken In Apache Stateful Functions, the routable Kafka ingress had no policy for malformed records. A record with a null key (there's no f…
The Redis & Kafka Interview Questions I Got Asked 23 Times (And How I Finally Answered Them)
Every senior backend interview I've done in the last 18 months asked at least one Redis question and one Kafka question. Below are the 10 that came…
SNS vs SQS vs Kinesis vs MSK vs EventBridge vs RabbitMQ: An Architect's Decision Matrix
By Swetha Golla · 8 min read · Senior Application Architect 🔗 This post has a live interactive version with a clickable per-service verdict and the…
The Kafka Incident That Was Just a Certificate (And the Operator That Saved MirrorMaker)
A Saturday afternoon alert: under-replicated partitions on the production Kafka cluster, well over the threshold. Status CRITICAL, replicas out of s…
Kafka for Engineers Who've Only Used REST: What Actually Changes
When I first read that Kafka was a "distributed event streaming platform," I nodded, closed the tab, and went back to writing REST endpoints. It too…
Event-Driven Architecture in Practice
Introduction In today's fast-paced digital landscape, businesses are constantly seeking innovative ways to stay ahead of the competition. One key st…
Kafka in hospitals: real-world event architecture for HIS, LIS and billing in a Venezuelan mid-size hospital
Most Kafka “healthcare interoperability” examples are theoretical or focused on US/EU EHRs. I wanted to share a concrete case from a mid‑size hospit…
Kafka record headers in Stateful Functions: closing a five-year-old gap
Apache Stateful Functions never let a function see Kafka record headers, and never let it set them. Five years, no headers. StateFun Actors 3.4.0-KZ…
Installing Apache Kafka 4.2 on Ubuntu (WSL2): A Complete KRaft Step-by-Step Guide
Installing Apache Kafka 4.2 on Ubuntu 24.04 (WSL2) Using KRaft Mode: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide Learn how to install Apache Kafka 4.2 in KRaft mo…
How I'd Design a Kafka-Based Payment Event Pipeline from Scratch
Architecture walkthroughs tend to show you the polished version — the diagram that survived a whiteboard, cleaned up after the fact. What they skip…
How to Install Apache Kafka on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (KRaft Mode, No ZooKeeper)
Table of Contents What is Apache Kafka and When Should You Use It KRaft Mode: Why ZooKeeper is No Longer Needed Prerequisites Step 1: Install Java 2…
Real-Time Inventory Management with Kafka: How Retailers Are Eliminating Stockouts
TL;DR Retailers process thousands of inventory transactions every second across physical stores, eCommerce platforms, warehouses, suppliers, and ful…
Kafka addressing & VPC peering
If you've ever tried to connect a Kafka client that lives in a different VPC than the cluster, you've probably hit this issue where there's a route…
Core Concept: Leader Election via Consensus
It's not agreeing on a transaction that's often the most expensive consensus operation in a distributed system, it's agreeing on who gets to decide…
Kafka Partitioning Strategies: How to Get It Right Before It Costs You
Most engineers don't think seriously about Kafka partitioning until something breaks in production. A topic that worked fine at low volume starts fa…
Five days with eventferry — MySQL, SQL Server, MSK IAM, and a core that didn't move
Five days ago I posted I built a transactional outbox toolkit for Node.js — meet eventferry . The pitch was small and specific: Postgres + Kafka, th…
I Built a Local-First Kafka GUI From Scratch to Handle Massive Clusters
Every data engineer or backend developer who has worked with Apache Kafka eventually runs into the same wall: tooling . For a long time, I felt stuc…
How to Integrate Apache Kafka with Spring Boot: A Production-Ready Guide
When a Spring Boot service needs to talk to another service without waiting on a synchronous HTTP call, message queues are the usual answer. Apache…
I Built a Mini Message Broker in Pure Python and Finally Understood How Kafka Moves Millions of Events
Last year I was on a team that pushed 40 million events per day through Kafka. We had consumer lag alerts, rebalancing incidents, and a whole runboo…
You can do WHAT with a Kafka proxy?
At Current 2026, I realized that nobody knows exactly what a Kafka proxy can do. Most engineers and architects think it's just some kind of reverse-…
Event-Driven Architecture: Uncle Explains Like You're Five 👦👨🦳
A conversation between Uncle (a backend architect) and Nephew (a curious developer) about events, publishers, subscribers, Redis Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ,…
"Confluence Docs Lie. Tie Your Documentation to Code Instead."
Every team has that Confluence page. The one that was carefully written to explain what the service does, what the API looks like, what each DB colu…
Real-Time Notification Systems Are Harder Than Most Teams Expect
If you’ve ever thought, “It’s just a WebSocket event,” this article is for you. Notification systems look simple on the surface, but in production t…
Apache Kafka Explained: A Practical Beginner Guide for Data Engineers
If you're learning data engineering, you'll probably meet Apache Kafka very early. You'll see it in job descriptions, system design diagrams, real-t…
klag just got a bunch better — here’s what’s new.
Over half year ago I’ve open sourced klag, a lightweight Kafka consumer lag exporter. I’ve been working in data streaming systems and data infrastru…
Strimzi: Create a simple Mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication
You probably already know about Strimzi . Strimzi enables Kafka on Kubernetes , simple as that. So, in this post, I will not talk about Strimzi , bu…