RR 447: All About Kafka and Oracle with Bob Quillin and Karthik Gaekwad

Bob Quillin and Karthik Gaekwad are on the Oracle developer relations team. Karthik has been on Ruby Rogues previously, and he explains how he went from the Kubernetes team to developer relations. They begin the show by explaining what Kafka is, the leading open-source event streaming platform that Oracle is compatible with. It allows cloud developers to build, publish, and subscribe models for streams of records in addition to many other functions. Systems that used to take a long time to make have become very small and simple with Kafka. Kafka stands out from other message queueing systems because of its robust nature and scalability. Bob goes into more depth about the evolution of Kafka and the panel discusses some different use cases, concluding that Kafka works best for projects with a large amount of data coming in and for making real-time decisions. Bob and Karthik talk about other things Kafka can do beyond the message queue, such as building streams from specific patterns. They talk about when you should consider moving over to Kafka. Karthik talks about how to get started with Kafka. One of the best ways to do this is to set up a service with Oracle and to just play around with it, which won’t cost you much if you aren’t pushing a lot of data through it. Bob and Karthik talk about some of the features offered by Oracle and Kafka. While the offerings are somewhat vanilla, you get the advantage of it being an open-source driven service on top of a cloud that’s highly secure, available, and built to last. The panel discusses security within Kafka. They talk briefly about the framework Karafka and tools and resources available through Oracle for Kafka. The show concludes with the panel talking about compatibility between Kafka and Docker.