7 scary stories about Apache Kafka

Complete with happy endings. Mostly.

In the shadowy realm of stream processing and terrible developer experience, where data flows ceaselessly through the digital ecosystem, spine-chilling tales are waiting to be told.

Tales that would terrify even the most seasoned software or platform engineer.

This season, the creative minds at Lenses.io peered into the abyss to bring you stories of Apache Kafka in a horror series of our own devising — scary stories that might be all too familiar to those who wrestle daily with the complexities of operating streaming data.

Here they are in full, with some resolutions.

Backup of the Living Dead

An unsuspecting group of developers experience data loss in Kafka without backup. Darkness descends. And they find corrupted data from a producer.

How can they bring the data back to life? How can they redeem the evil spirit of the producer data zombies, before they devour the flesh of yet more applications?

Amid the endless gray expanse of code and panic from the business, the developers find solace. Father Lenses stands guard with data observability and a streaming backup preserved for hundreds of years in the house of S3. The Father is able to perform an exorcism on the producer, and with the help of the mystic power of the Kafka S3 Connector, restore data that was once presumed dead.

The Haunting of Microservice Hill

Stuck between past and real-time, an event-driven app team unravels the mysteries of mapping data flows across countless services.

The flashbacks, fear and paranoia must mean something; and they need access to Apache Kafka to find out what it is.

Lenses, their guiding light, slices through the fog with its topological lens and archival wisdom.

Before the team’s eyes, the movements of their data are charted across the expanse, a map of interlacing fates and dependencies. The cryptic fog of Microservice Hill disperses, and the team steps forward, eyes clear, ready to weave business value from the once-tangled web.

Kafka Psycho

A once-shy Zookeeper gets cabin fever and goes crazy, leading to the complete disappearance of your Kafka platform.

How can you help solve the mystery, by finding the best way to monitor and set up alerting on your Kafka, and slay the Zookeeper before there’s no turning back?

Enter Lenses, offering a lifeline to monitor the Zookeeper’s pulse. Using alerts, the team can act to avert disaster. In a twist of fate, the lost Platform returns, and the Zookeeper is tamed, its sanity restored by the watchful eyes of the platform team.

The Compliance Chainsaw Massacre

Classic high-stakes slasher film — developers request Kafka access whilst in the middle of a security audit.

Is there a way to protect Kafka from regulatory bloodshed, whilst providing self-service to your dev team?

You arrive with Lenses, cool and detached, using its refined access control and audit trails — a nod to order in a world teetering on chaos.

The threat of regulatory slaughter is quietly sidestepped, and the developers carry on calmly, streamlined and effective.

The Silence of the Consumer

Eerily, the consumers assigned to process a topic’s messages have stopped screaming, creating an ominous and silent lag.

Brilliant yet unorthodox data engineer, Clarice, previously haunted from a similar case when she was a child, investigates. What does she find when she troubleshoots her downstream applications?

With Lenses, an extension of her keen intellect, she has the vision to pierce through the veil of data, to monitor the pulse of consumer lag, to scrutinize the health of consumers, and bear witness to the topic, poisoned by a cheap Chianti.

Under her scrutiny — a touch here, a correction there — the consumers, like feral creatures reawakened, resume their feast of bytes and bits. The backlog dissipates, and the stream of messages flows as it should.

The equilibrium restored, Clarice withdraws, the symphony of data once more complete, each consumer singing again. The stillness had been an interloper, an anomaly, and Clarice feels the quiet satisfaction of order restored.

Resident Evil Producer

In a secret development lab, developing an experimental application mutation run by the evil RainCoat Corp, a Kafka producer gets infected following a biohazard.

With no Schema Registry in the city to be found, and months away from being released to rescue an application in production, the producer is left to eat the flesh of JSON events in a Kafka topic, bringing chaos and fear to Streaming City.

Who to trust, and who could be next?

The Walking Dead Letter Queue

Where failed Kafka Connect messages go to die. Or do they?

When messages get infected and encounter errors too grave to overcome, the Sheriff needs a way to query and backup message headers, and not lose his own head over an apocalyptic IT incident.

But using Lenses, the Sheriff wielded a tool as vital as any weapon against the undead. It allowed him to sift through the chaos, to back up the precious headers, to keep the horde of incidents at bay without losing his mind amidst the carnage.

Alerts became his watchful sentries, warning him of issues as they unfolded. With every ping, he fortified his defenses, tracked down the lost and the damned, and salvaged what many believed was beyond saving.

The dead letter queue, once a pit of despair, became a beacon of redemption. Messages were not left to decay but were reclaimed, restored to purpose, and the Sheriff stood steadfast, his head held high as the digital realm thrived in the face of the apocalypse.