Using Kafka for Helping Hands

The Helping Hands application uses Apache Kafka to implement the observer model and send asynchronous events among microservices. It is also used as an event store to capture all the state change events generated from microservices that are consumed by the Lookup service to build a consolidated view to server lookup requests. The Alert microservice of the Helping Hands application also receives the alert events via the Kafka topic and sends an email asynchronously.

Apache Kafka includes five core APIs:

• The Producer API allows applications to publish streams of events to one or more topics
• The Consumer API allows applications to consume published events from one or more topics
• The Streams API allows transforming streams from input topics and publish the results to output topics
• The Connect API allows support for various input and output sources to capture and dump stream of events
• The AdminClient API allows topics and server management along with other Kafka management...