fastkafka VS datagen

Our journey with FastStream started when we needed to integrate our machine learning models into a customer's Apache Kafka environment. To streamline this process, we created FastKafka using AIOKafka, AsyncAPI, and asyncio. It was our first step in making message queue management easier.

After a short discussion, we concluded we were just too spoiled to use low-level libraries that were nothing more than just tiny wrappers around C++ libs and that we could just build our own. So, we shamelessly made one by reusing beloved paradigms from FastAPI and we shamelessly named it FastKafka. The point was to set the expectations right - you get pretty much what you would expect: function decorators for consumers and producers with type hints specifying Pydantic classes for JSON encoding/decoding, automatic message routing to Kafka brokers and documentation generation.

FastStream simplifies the process of writing producers and consumers for message queues, handling all the parsing, networking and documentation generation automatically. It is a new package based on the ideas and experiences gained from FastKafka and Propan. By joining our forces, we picked up the best from both packages and created a unified way to write services capable of processing streamed data regardless of the underlying protocol. We'll continue to maintain both packages, but new development will be in this project.

FastStream (https://github.com/airtai/faststream) is a new Python framework, born from Propan and FastKafka teams' collaboration (both are deprecated now). It extremely simplifies event-driven system development, handling all the parsing, networking, and documentation generation automatically. Now FastStream supports RabbitMQ and Kafka, but supported brokers are constantly growing (wait for NATS and Redis a bit). FastStream itself is a really great tool to build event-driven services. Also, it has a native FastAPI integration. Just create a StreamRouter (very close to APIRouter) and register event handlers the same with the regular HTTP-endpoints way:

Inspired by FastAPI, FastKafka uses the same paradigms for routing, validation, and documentation, making it easy to learn and integrate into your existing streaming data projects. Please check out the latest version adds supporting the newly released Pydantic v2.0, making it significantly faster. https://github.com/airtai/fastkafka

For fake data, shameless plug for https://github.com/MaterializeInc/datagen/tree/main

Building and testing a real-time fraud detection application requires a continuous stream of realistic data. But generating that data can be a challenge. That's why we recently created the Datagen CLI, a simple tool that helps you create believable fake data using the FakerJS API.

Generate fake data with a normalized schema of your choosing with this tool from Materialize, then denormalize it and build a warehouse model.