jr VS kcat

We have seen how to use JR in more advanced use cases, streaming quality random data with referential integrity. In the next part of this series, we will see how to use REST apis with JR. In the meanwhile, happy streaming!

Datagen is the de-facto standard to generate random data for Kafka. But customising what's generated is not something you can do in 30 seconds, and enabling compression is currently not an option with the managed connectors. So I decided to write a tool which you could use to easily start streaming random data to kafka in seconds, and that's why JR was born. With the help of some friends and colleagues we packed JR with a lot of features (and many more coming!)

So, is JR yet another faking library written in Go? Yes and no. JR indeed implements most of the APIs in fakerjs and Go fake it, but it's also able to stream data directly to stdout, Kafka, Redis and more (Elastic and MongoDB coming). JR can talk directly to Confluent Schema Registry, manage json-schema and Avro schemas, easily maintain coherence and referential integrity. If you need more than what is OOTB in JR, you can also easily pipe your data streams to other cli tools like kcat thanks to its flexibility.

This deployment creates a kcat container we can use to produce and consume messages.

Now we don't see any additional output. To verify it worked, let's use kafkacat to consume the topic's events. (We install kafkacat in the Dev Container. Please run the following command in VSCode's terminal)

Before we come to an end here, let's explore one additional helpful tool: kcat (formerly known as kafkacat).

Let's look at the data in the ad_events topic from the Kafka broker and see if we can identify the problem. We'll install kcat (formerly kafkacat):

kcat (formerly KafkaCat) - https://github.com/edenhill/kcat

Start with multiple consumers and produce events (this gives a sense about consistency or need for reliable data) - Producer could be command line or kafkacat

kcat is an awesome tool to make our life easier, it allows us to read and write from kafka topics without tons of scripts and in a more user-friendly way.

kcat