Apache Kafka at Takealot.com – Use cases and production considerations

Due to popular demand, we'll be taking a slight detour from the talk series and look into a case study for our last talk. The talk after that in March will again go towards more theoretical fundamentals - Stateful vs Stateless.

Carl Scheffler, takealot.com's Machine Learning lead, will present:

Apache Kafka at Takealot.com – Use cases and production considerations

We've been running Kafka in production for almost 2 years now and have learnt a lot in the process. I'll cover some of our use cases, the functionality that we have layered on top of Kafka to make it work for us, and production issues we've had to deal with while running a Kafka cluster.

Due to time constraints I won't spend much time explaining Kafka internals, but knowing some of them would help you get the most out of the discussion. If you're willing to do some reading before the event, this is a very readable and informative article on how Kafka handles event sourcing at scale:

https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying

Doors open at 6pm, with drinks in the beginning (anyone keen to sponsor Pizza? Please contact me!). The talk will start around 6.30pm.