Adding Avro to your Kafka streams to meet your messaging needs

Now that you have Kafka up and running how are you going to use it? Kafka doesn't care what it transfers; just that it gets delivered.

You can blaze your own trail defining everything, but then everything is your and your user's responsibility. You can create the equivalent of a HATEOS message - which bloats your message and requires your clients to create a smart parser. In contrast you can create a minimalist message - which requires your clients to know everything about what your message and they'll have to make updates every-time you change the message.

Enter Avro. Using Avro schemas allows you to define and share you message schema with all the information to validate your message ... without bloating your actual messages.

In this talk we will be exploring what Avro is, what it isn't, and if it's worth your time. As a hardened Perl* programmer who lives by TIMTOWTDI, who abhors systems that get in the way by imposing their ideology, I'll share with you why I've adopted Avro when dealing with Kafka. * Code examples may include a Perl example, but will be primarily in Java.