In the last post, we explored the fine-grained control of Flink’s DataStream API. Now, we’ll approach the same problem from a higher level of abstraction using the Flink Table API. This post demonstrates how to build a declarative analytics pipeline that processes our continuous stream of Avro-formatted order events. We will define a Table on top of a DataStream and use SQL-like expressions to perform windowed aggregations. This example highlights the power and simplicity of the Table API for analytical tasks and showcases Flink’s seamless integration between its different API layers to handle complex requirements like late data.

Building on our exploration of stream processing, we now transition from Kafka’s native library to Apache Flink, a powerful, general-purpose distributed processing engine. In this post, we’ll dive into Flink’s foundational DataStream API. We will tackle the same supplier statistics problem - analyzing a stream of Avro-formatted order events - but this time using Flink’s robust features for stateful computation. This example will highlight Flink’s sophisticated event-time processing with watermarks and its elegant, built-in mechanisms for handling late-arriving data through side outputs.

In this post, we shift our focus from basic Kafka clients to real-time stream processing with Kafka Streams. We’ll explore a Kotlin application designed to analyze a continuous stream of Avro-formatted order events, calculate supplier statistics in tumbling windows, and intelligently handle late-arriving data. This example demonstrates the power of Kafka Streams for building lightweight, yet robust, stream processing applications directly within your Kafka ecosystem, leveraging event-time processing and custom logic.

In this post, we’ll explore a practical example of building Kafka client applications using Kotlin, Apache Avro for data serialization, and Gradle for build management. We’ll walk through the setup of a Kafka producer that generates mock order data and a consumer that processes these orders. This example highlights best practices such as schema management with Avro, robust error handling, and graceful shutdown, providing a solid foundation for your own Kafka-based projects. We’ll dive into the build configuration, the Avro schema definition, utility functions for Kafka administration, and the core logic of both the producer and consumer applications.

This post explores a Kotlin-based Kafka project, meticulously detailing the construction and operation of both a Kafka producer application, responsible for generating and sending order data, and a Kafka consumer application, designed to receive and process these orders. We’ll delve into each component, from build configuration to message handling, to understand how they work together in an event-driven system.

Amazon MSK can be configured as an event source of a Lambda function. Lambda internally polls for new messages from the event source and then synchronously invokes the target Lambda function. With this feature, we can develop a Kafka consumer application in serverless environment where developers can focus on application logic. In this lab, we will discuss how to create a Kafka consumer using a Lambda function.

Kafka Connect is a tool for scalably and reliably streaming data between Apache Kafka and other systems. It makes it simple to quickly define connectors that move large collections of data into and out of Kafka. In this lab, we will discuss how to create a data pipeline that ingests data from a Kafka topic into a DynamoDB table using the Camel DynamoDB sink connector.

In this lab, we will create a Pyflink application that exports Kafka topic messages into a S3 bucket. The app enriches the records by adding a new column using a user defined function and writes them via the FileSystem SQL connector. This allows us to achieve a simpler architecture compared to the original lab where the records are sent into Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, enriched by a separate Lambda function and written to a S3 bucket afterwards. While the records are being written to the S3 bucket, a Glue table will be created to query them on Amazon Athena.

In this lab, we will create a Pyflink application that reads records from S3 and sends them into a Kafka topic. A custom pipeline Jar file will be created as the Kafka cluster is authenticated by IAM, and it will be demonstrated how to execute the app in a Flink cluster deployed on Docker as well as locally as a typical Python app. We can assume the S3 data is static metadata that needs to be joined into another stream, and this exercise can be useful for data enrichment.

In the previous post, we discussed how to develop a data pipeline from Apache Kafka into OpenSearch locally using Docker. The pipeline will be deployed on AWS using Amazon MSK, Amazon MSK Connect and Amazon OpenSearch Service using Terraform in this post. First the infrastructure will be deployed that covers a VPC, VPN server, MSK Cluster and OpenSearch domain. Then Kafka source and sink connectors will be deployed on MSK Connect, followed by performing quick data analysis.