kafkat VS secor

Few tips before I close this blog post, always have enough memory in Kafka server as it is very memory intensive and tends to shutdown gracefully every time it hits heap size limit without indicating anything in the logs. For monitoring your cluster use Kafka Manager, it does the job very well and also have KafkaT on server which saves you from running cumbersome builtin Kafka commands.

secor: Seems a bit on the older side

Since you are trying to archive this data, a simpler solution is to use something like secor to archive the data in kafka to S3. It’s much cheaper than dynamodb too.

Once we had our producer working for Kafka , it was time for a consumer to start pulling data and push it to GCS. With some research over at Github we found Secor from Pinterest to be a viable option for our use. Though it being a great piece of software, it wasn't mapping ideally to our design, for that purpose we had to submit few Pull requests to make the necessary changes to the secor project for our use and the greater good of the open source community. From updating the docs (PR268, PR271, PR277) on how to set it up to adding flexible upload directory structure with hourly support (PR275) and support for partitioned parser with no offset folder (PR279), also added flexible delimited file reader, writer option (PR291) for better control over file structure. Below diagram is our current ELT pipeline running in production.