Kafka for Developers

We start with the fundamentals of Kafka development and discover through hands-on coding challenges how to build performant and reliable applications.

Focus:

• How do we produce and consume messages? Producer and Consumer APIs — your first programming challenges with Kafka, from sending your first message to mastering consumer groups
• How do we build reliable and fast applications? Performance tuning, transactions, and exactly-once semantics — the techniques that separate prototypes from production-grade code
• What tools do we need? Introduction to all essential development tools, local Kafka environments, and CLI tooling so you can work productively from day one

We go beyond simple messaging and turn Kafka into a full streaming platform. You will learn how to build real-time data pipelines and stream processing applications.

Focus:

• How do we process data in real time? Kafka Streams fundamentals — topology design, stateless and stateful operations, windowing, and joins
• How do we connect Kafka to other systems? Kafka Connect for integrating databases, APIs, and file systems with minimal code
• How do we handle data formats at scale? Schema Registry with Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema — so your data stays consistent as your team grows

We bring everything together and prepare your applications for real-world deployment. You will learn the patterns, testing strategies, and operational practices that make Kafka applications production-ready.

Focus:

• What happens when things go wrong? Error handling patterns — dead letter queues, retry topics, and strategies for graceful failure recovery
• How do we test streaming applications? Automated testing with TopologyTestDriver and Testcontainers — so you can ship with confidence
• What does my team need to know for go-live? Deployment patterns, monitoring, security basics, and the shared responsibilities between developers and operations