Kafka
Browse all articles, tutorials, and guides about Kafka
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Queue or Log? Kafka, RabbitMQ and NATS All Do Both Now
Kafka has queues, RabbitMQ has streams, and NATS JetStream does both, so the broker is no longer the choice. We ran replay, a poison message, extra consumers and a retry through six setups. Two settings decided every result. We also found that RabbitMQ 4.3 quietly stops dead-lettering poison messages for consumers that nack.
The Producer Changed the Schema and Nobody Told the Consumer
A schema registry stops the obvious breakages and sleeps through the expensive ones. Two changes to the same event, demonstrated live: one the registry rejects before it is published, one it cannot see at all because the schema never changed.
Getting a Row Change Out of Postgres Without Dual-Writing
Your service writes to Postgres and publishes to Kafka, and one day those two disagree. The fix is to make the database the only writer and read changes from its log: the outbox pattern, logical decoding, and the replication-slot failure mode that quietly fills your primary's disk, demonstrated live with real numbers.
Why Your Kafka Bill Is Mostly Network
Run the numbers on a self-managed Kafka cluster and the biggest line item is not brokers or disks, it is cross-AZ data transfer. Here is the arithmetic, where every gigabyte crosses a zone boundary, and the four levers that actually shrink the bill.
6 Apache Kafka Use Cases, and When You Do Not Need Kafka
Six patterns where Kafka genuinely earns its operational cost, what each one looks like in practice, and the failure mode nobody mentions until you are already running it in production.