Project Every Record Counts: Data Engineering for Backend Engineers
Part 27: "The Backbone" — Kafka for Analytics
Rohan has run Kafka for years, for services. Analytics asks different questions of it: which key keeps order, how long the log remembers, which schema change a registry must refuse, and whether a reader sees an aborted transaction. Topics as code, Avro through Apicurio Registry from Java 25 producers, a refused rename, the Iceberg Kafka Connect sink built from source, and Flink SQL reading the same bytes.