Making Distributed Systems Easy with Apache Kafka

Presenting at Minnebar 14 at Best Buy headquarters in Richfield, Minnesota was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone who came to listen and learn about Apache Kafka, event-driven architecture, and making distributed systems easy.

Abstract

As event-driven design and microservice architectures are becoming more popular, distributed systems are being seen often and becoming more complex. A once simple web server with a database is now often distributed between multiple databases, caches, services, and systems. By utilizing Apache Kafka, one can reduce the complexity of a distributed system, build fault-tolerant & scalable services, de-couple integrations between different components, and easily expand when new systems are needed.

In this presentation, I’ll go over what a distributed system is, what event-driven architecture is, how it relates to service-oriented architecture, and why we need distributed systems. I’ll give an overview of Apache Kafka, how it works, and how it relates to other message brokers. Lastly, I’ll share my experiences utilizing Apache Kafka as the backbone to build a scalable, fault-tolerant data streaming platform.

Slide Deck

If you're interested in the slides, they can be found here:

/content/images/minnebar-14-kafka-slides.pdf

I believe it was recorded – if Minnestar posts the recorded talk, I'll update this post and share the link. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions!