Kafka Screams: The Scariest JIRAs and How To Survive Them ft. Anna McDonald

In today's spooktacular episode of Streaming Audio, Anna McDonald (Technical Account Manager, Confluent) discusses six of the scariest Apache Kafka® JIRAs. Starting with KAFKA-6431: Lock Contention in Purgatory, Anna breaks down what purgatory is and how it’s not something to fear or avoid. 

Next, she dives into KAFKA-8522: Tombstones Can Survive Forever, where she explains tombstones, compacted topics, null values, and log compaction. Not to mention there’s KAFKA-6880: Zombie Replicas Must Be Fenced, which sounds like the spookiest of them all. 

KAFKA-8233, which focuses on the new TestTopology mummy (wrapper) class, provides one option for setting the topology through your Kafka Screams Streams application. As Anna puts it, "This opens doors for people to build better, more resilient, and more interesting topologies." 

To close out the episode, Anna talks about two more JIRAs: KAFKA-6738, which focuses on the Kafka Connect dead letter queue as a means of handling bad data, and the terrifying KAFKA-5925 on the addition of an executioner API. 

EPISODE LINKS

• KAFKA-6431: Lock Contention in Purgatory
• KAFKA-8522: Tombstones Can Survive Forever
• KAFKA-6880: Zombie Replicas Must Be Fenced
• KAFKA-8233: Helper Classes to Make it Simpler to Write Test Logic with TopologyTestDriver 
• KAFKA-6738: Kafka Connect Handling of Bad Data
• KAFKA-5925: Adding Records Deletion Operation to the New Admin Client API
• Streaming Apps and Poison Pills: Handle the Unexpected with Kafka Streams
• Data Modeling for Apache Kafka – Streams, Topics & More with Dani Traphagen
• Distributed Systems Engineering with Apache Kafka ft. Jason Gustafson
• Kafka Streams Topology Visualizer
• Follow Anna McDonald on Twitter
• Follow Mitch Henderson on Twitter
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• Fully managed Apache Kafka as a service! Try free.