The recording of the talk that Kate Stanley and I gave at Kafka Summit Americas is now available.
Events stored in Kafka are just bytes, this is one of the reasons Kafka is so flexible. But when developing a producer or consumer you want objects, not bytes. Documenting and defining events provides a common way to discuss and agree on an approach to using Kafka. It also informs developers how to consume events without needing access to the developers responsible for producing events.
In our talk, we introduced the most popular formats for documenting events that flow through Kafka, such as AsyncAPI, Avro, CloudEvents, JSON schemas, and Protobuf.
We discussed the differences between the approaches and how to decide on a documentation strategy. Alongside the formats, we also touched on the tooling available for the different approaches. Tools for testing and code generation can make a big difference to your day-to-day developer experience.
The talk was aimed at developers who maybe aren’t already documenting their Kafka events or who wanted to see other approaches.
watch the recording on the Kafka Summit website
download our slides on slideshare
Tags: apacheavro, apachekafka, asyncapi, avro, kafka