Dissolving the Problem: Kafka is more ACID Than Your Database

Dissolving the Problem: Kafka is more ACID Than Your Database - Tim Berglund

It has become a truism in the past decade that building systems at scale, using non-relational databases, requires giving up on the transactional guarantees afforded by the relational databases of yore. ACID transactional semantics are fine, but we all know you can’t have them all in a distributed system. Or can we?

In this talk, I will argue that by designing our systems around a distributed log like Kafka, we can in fact achieve ACID semantics at scale. We can ensure that distributed write operations can be applied atomically, consistently, in isolation between services, and of course with durability. What seems to be a counterintuitive conclusion ends up being straightforwardly achievable using existing technologies, as an elusive set of properties becomes relatively easy to achieve with the right architectural paradigm underlying the application.

Schedule

• 6:30 PM: Food & drink (including alcohol) provided and conversation
• 7:00 PM: Announcements
• 7:05 PM: Main Session

About the Speaker

Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with Confluent, where he serves as the Senior Director of Developer Experience. He can frequently be found at speaking at conferences in the United States and all over the world. He is the co-presenter of various O’Reilly training videos on topics ranging from Git to Distributed Systems, and is the author of Gradle Beyond the Basics. He tweets as @tlberglund, blogs very occasionally at http://timberglund.com, is the co-host of the http://devrelrad.io podcast, and lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their youngest child, the other two having mostly grown up.