Managing your Kafka in an explosive growth environment

Description

Frequently, Kafka is just a piece of the stack that lives in production that often times no one wants to touch—because it just works. Kafka sits at the core of AppsFlyer’s infrastructure that processes billions of events daily.

Alon Gavra dives into how AppsFlyer built its microservices architecture with Kafka as its core piece to support 70B+ requests daily. With continuous growth, the company needed to “learn on the job” how to improve its Kafka architecture by moving to the producer-owner cluster model, breaking up its massive monolith clusters to smaller, more robust clusters and migrating from an older version of Kafka with real-time production clients and data streams. Alon outlines best practices for leveraging Kafka’s in-memory capabilities and built-in partitioning, as well as some of the tweaks and stabilization mechanisms that enable real-time performance at web scale, alongside processes for continuous upgrades and deployments with end-to-end automation, in an environment of constant traffic growth.