Why Apache Kafka Clusters Are Like Galaxies (And Other Cosmic Kafka Quandaries Explored)

Instaclustr (now part of NetApp) manages 100s of Apache Kafka clusters of many different sizes, for a variety of use cases and customers. For the last 7 years I’ve been focused outwardly on exploring Kafka application development challenges, but recently I decided to look inward and see what I could discover about the performance, scalability and resource characteristics of the Kafka clusters themselves. Using a suite of Performance Engineering techniques, I will reveal some surprising discoveries about cosmic Kafka mysteries in our data centres, related to: cluster sizes and distribution (using Zipf’s Law), horizontal vs. vertical scalability, and predicting Kafka performance using metrics, modelling and regression techniques. These insights are relevant to Kafka developers and operators.