Company
Date Published
Author
Ewen Cheslack-Postava, Olivia Greene, Ahmed Saef Zamzam, Prabha Manepalli, Weifan Liang
Word count
2929
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The Kafka REST Proxy allows developers to easily access a Kafka cluster from any language, enabling the creation of comprehensive Kafka support in just a couple of hours. A node.js wrapper was built to demonstrate this, providing a minimal and intuitive API that mirrors the REST API. The library is designed to handle various produce requests with flexibility and ease, making it suitable for different use cases. By mirroring the resources provided by the API, the resulting library is only 600 lines of non-blank, non-comment code. The wrapper also handles consumers, providing a simple and native node.js API. An application was built using this wrapper to compute trending hashtags on Twitter data stored in Kafka, demonstrating its functionality with minimal code. This approach provides decoupling between services, improved availability, and reduced complexity, making it an attractive solution for building microservices with Kafka.