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Danny Verpoort
Danny Verpoort

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An alternative or simpler way to event stream with or without Kafka

Alright hear me out, I know I'm over-engineering this hobby project but I could use some advice.

In the Netherlands, emergency services receive their alerts via texts on pagers. I've bought a receiver that makes it possible to (legally!) intercept these messages and it's churning away gathering all the alerts.

I'm also into microservices and now I've got something that's steadily producing data that I can eventually show in a web interface. Now let's say that I would like to use an event bus to introduce the data captured from the alerts to the microservices which parse it and store some data (i.e. about which types of units, what kind of locations, etc.).

I've set up a cheap Kubernetes cluster in Google making use of GitLab CI/CD, Terraform, and some helm charts with KubeIP and Traefik. This is all running fine.

Now comes the challenging part. I would love to try to use Kafka to publish the events in my microservice network but geez does it become complicated there. I've found some Helm charts here which seem to be meant for development, testing, or proof of concept services but it seems to contain more than just Kafka and Zookeeper. Looking at the documentation for real production data it seems like an even more daunting task.

Now here's my question:

What's your advice for running an event bus in a Kubernetes environment for a hobby project where I'm not necessarily afraid to learn new stuff? I'd love to hear your advice for either a bare-bone Kafka approach or any other products you could advise. Keep in mind that the budget is pretty much non-existent because It's a hobby project.

That's enough making my life unnecessarily complicated for today! :)

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