Tales of Kafka @Cloudflare: Lessons Learnt on the Way to 1 Trillion Messages

QCon London 2023

Session Microservices

Tales of Kafka @Cloudflare: Lessons Learnt on the Way to 1 Trillion Messages

Monday Mar 27 / 02:55PM BST, Fleming (3rd Fl.)

Abstract

Cloudflare uses Kafka to decouple microservices and communicate the creation, change or deletion of various resources via a common data format in a fault-tolerant manner. This decoupling is one of many factors that enables Cloudflare engineering teams to work on multiple features and products concurrently.

We learnt a lot about Kafka on the way to one trillion messages, and built some interesting internal tools to ease adoption as well as improve resiliency that will be explored in this talk.

Interview

Andrea: I work as a Systems Engineer at Cloudflare. I research and help prioritize what's needed to make other developers' lives easier. I design, implement and maintain platforms used by other teams to do their job effectively. For example, we maintain SDKs for Kafka and platforms that allow emitting alerts, emails audit logs and so on.

We wanted to share more about what we do for productivity, organizational culture, and also I've never spoken to such a big conference before, so it's an amazing chance for me to become more confident.

I think there will be a lot of people that have a lot of experience, senior engineering, CTOs, tech leads.

A better understanding of how to set up for success when deciding to integrate with Kafka, especially in a big company where there's a lot of traffic. Many of the points in our presentation also apply to different worlds, different platforms and systems. I think everyone can get something from it. 

Topics

Microservices Kafka resilience case study
76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon London 2023 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.

Share

From the same track

Monday 27 March

10:35 Churchill (Ground Fl.) Session scalability Scaling Google's Global Cloud L7 Load Balancer James Spooner Principal Engineer, Load Balancing @Google 11:50 Rutherford (4th Fl.) Unconference Unconference: Architectures You've Always Wondered About Shane Hastie Global Delivery Lead @SoftEd, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods @InfoQ 13:40 Whittle (3rd Fl.) Session Building High-Fidelity Data Streams Sid Anand Fellow, Cloud & Data Platform @Walmart, Apache Airflow Committer/PMC, Ex-Netflix, LinkedIn, eBay, Etsy, & PayPal 14:55 Fleming (3rd Fl.) Session Microservices Tales of Kafka @Cloudflare: Lessons Learnt on the Way to 1 Trillion Messages Andrea Medda, Matt Boyle 16:10 Churchill (Ground Fl.) Session scalability Zoom: Why Does It Work? Ian Sleebe Senior Solutions Architect @Zoom 17:25 Fleming (3rd Fl.) Session Microservices Banking on Thousands of Microservices Suhail Patel Senior Staff Engineer @Monzo Leading the Platform and Data Functions, Previously @Citymapper