Years of Experience
&
Deep Insights

Every framework has pitfalls, and Kafka Streams is no exception. Running Kafka Streams in production at scale presents unique challenges that can't be solved with basic tutorials. Deep framework knowledge is essential to avoid costly mistakes and ensure your applications are both reliable and scalable. This expertise typically comes from years of hard-won experience, scattered blog posts, and conference presentations. Through my years of coaching teams using Kafka Streams in production, I've identified critical insights that separate successful implementations from problematic ones. This book distills that knowledge, helping you sidestep common pitfalls and master some of Kafka Streams' complexities. This book won't teach you the basics, but instead will bring you to the next level in mastering Kafka Streams.

What you'll learn

  • Choose the right partitioning strategy to maximize throughput, avoid hotspots and ensure correctness
  • Tune RocksDB for stability, Kafka Streams' persistent state store.
  • How to avoid OOM (Out of Memory) issues that impact large-scale stateful applications
  • How Kafka Streams threads, tasks, state stores and partitions interact, so you can build with confidence
  • Prevent expensive state-related issues (especially with dependency injection frameworks!)
  • Mitigate frequent and long rebalance cycles that kill your application's performance
  • Implement bulletproof exception handling for maximum uptime and reliability

Explanations and solutions for these common log messages

Member consumer sending LeaveGroup request to coordinator broker-1:29092 because of consumer poll timeout has expired. This means the time between subsequent calls to poll() was longer than the configured max.poll.interval.ms, which typically implies that the poll loop is spending too much time processing messages.

Requesting followup rebalance be scheduled by <> for <> to probe for caught-up replica tasks

Requested to schedule next probing rebalance at <> to try for a more balanced assignment

Troubleshooting production issues is costly

I've spent countless hours debugging Kafka Streams issues in production—sometimes taking days to fully understand and resolve a single problem. At typical engineering hourly rates, these debugging sessions become expensive fast.
This book packages those hard-earned insights at a fraction of what those production incidents would cost you.

Master the framework, prevent the problems

Most issues stem from an incomplete understanding of the framework. While Kafka Streams' API makes it easy to build streaming pipelines quickly, operating them reliably at scale requires deeper knowledge. It's a powerful framework with an approachable API, but in production, the underlying complexity surfaces quickly. Beyond just providing solutions, this book helps you understand why these issues occur and how the framework really works—enabling you to design resilient, high-performance applications from the start.

8 Chapters, 8 Insights
Years of production experience distilled
Save days troubleshooting
Know the internals, build with confidence
Become your team's Kafka Streams expert
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