kafka

What I learned

• Very complex to start (Apache tutorial is wrong) - that's why there're companies like Confluent, Cloudurable offering manager service
• I can make tweaks to the streams to filter, format messages before they're read.
• After that, things get easier.

Pros

• Easy to prototype (if I can get past the wrong tutorial)
• Producers, consumers, transformers are modular
• Scalable (but only up)

Cons

• Tough to start from scratch.
• Java client library is verbose. No python-like official library
• No native UI to manage, requires human intervention
• Too much work for a small or one-man businesses.

Important commands

mvn compile exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="myapps.WordCount" to run the transformer.