kafkacat VS liftbridge

To communicate with Kafka, you can use Kafkacat, a command-line tool that allows to produce and consume Kafka messages using a very simple syntax. It also allows you to view the topics' metadata.

Feels like you could get pretty far with kafkacat and a SQLite database.

This is the second release version of Kafcat. Kafcat is a Rust fully async rewrite of kafkacat.

Consume from the Kafka topic my.topic with kafkacat:

From the code above, you can see that to process the headers, simply use the ConsumerRecord.headers() method to return the headers. In our example above, we’re printing the headers out to the console for demonstration purposes. Once you have access to the headers, you can process them as needed. For reading headers from the command line, KIP-431 adds support for optionally printing headers from the ConsoleConsumer, which will be available in the Apache Kafka 2.7.0 release.You can also use kafkacat to view headers from the command line. Here’s an example command:

Note: In the example above, we have used kafkacat to consume the topics. The option -o-1 is used to only consume the latest message

Liftbridge (https://liftbridge.io/) is more or less the NATS Kafka versioning.

[Gufo Liftbridge](https://pypi.org/project/gufo-liftbridge/) is the Python asyncio Liftbridge client.

https://liftbridge.io/

Apache Pulsar might be worth a look, but it's actually more complex under the hood than Kafka, but has a lot of features built-in that either aren't in FOSS Kafka yet, like tiered storage, or won't be until Confluent doesn't dominate the PMC (like an integrated schema registry), or just can't be done very nicely, if at all, like decent multi-tenancy.

That said, it's a fast moving target, the code quality last I looked was patchy in places, ditto the documentation for both it and Bookkeeper, and the admin overhead is higher (managing bookies and brokers and Zookeepers vs. just brokers and ZK with Kafka, or when KRaft is production ready, just brokers).

This is basically an ad for GCP right?

That said, it looks like Kafka is by far and away the way to handle persistent logs/events at scale. AFAIK a company here in Japan called LINE has all their messaging flowing through a large kafka cluster themselves.

Wonder if anyone is running large NATS Jetstream[0]/Liftbridge[1] or Pulsar[2] (yahoo runs those) clusters. I guess Pulsar might be #2 in terms of adoption at large scale?

[0]: https://docs.nats.io/jetstream/jetstream

[1]: https://liftbridge.io/

[2]: https://pulsar.apache.org/

Do you need the messages to be durable, if so you can have a look at Liftbridge: - https://liftbridge.io/ - https://github.com/liftbridge-io/liftbridge

And if you want closer kafka semantics built on top of nats, check out liftbridge:

https://liftbridge.io/