Kafka: a Modern Distributed System

You may have heard that Apache Kafka plays a central role in modern event-driven architectures. It lies at the heart of successful microservices implementations -- its loyal following is well versed in Kafka's key APIs: the Producer and Consumer, Kafka Streams, and maybe even KSQL. But have you ever wanted to take a peek under the hood and understand how it all works?

In this talk, we’ll cover Kafka's distributed system fundamentals: the role of the Controller, the mechanics of leader election, the role of Zookeeper today and in the future. We’ll look at how read and write consistency work, how they are tunable, and how how recent innovations like exactly-once semantics and observer replicas work. Come to this talk to view Kafka through the lens of distributed systems fundamentals.