Posts Tagged ‘eventstreams’

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Taming the Kafka topics Wild West

Tuesday, September 17th, 2024

aka Approaches to managing Kafka topic creation with IBM Event Streams

How can you best operate central Kafka clusters, that can be shared by multiple different development teams?

Administrators talk about wanting to enable teams to create Kafka topics when they need them, but worry about it resulting in their Kafka clusters turning into a sprawling “Wild West”. At best, they talk about the mess of anonymous topics that are named and configured inconsistently. At worst, they talk about topics being created or configured in ways that negatively affect their Kafka cluster and impact their other users.

With that in mind, I wanted to share a few ideas for how to control the topics that are created in your Event Streams cluster:

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What is IBM Event Automation?

Tuesday, July 4th, 2023

A summary of IBM Event Automation in under 200 words.

Last week was the first release of IBM Event Automation. I’ve been asked what it’s all about, so I thought it’d be helpful to have a brief summary to point people at.

IBM Event Automation is a collection of three components, designed to help companies be productive in creating event-driven solutions.

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Using client quotas with IBM Event Streams

Sunday, February 26th, 2023

In this post, I want to highlight a feature that I often see under-used in IBM Event Streams, and show how you can easily give it a try.

Kafka can enforce quotas to limit the impact that client applications can have on your cluster. To quote the Kafka documentation:

It is possible for producers and consumers to produce/consume very high volumes of data or generate requests at a very high rate and thus monopolize broker resources, cause network saturation and generally DOS other clients and the brokers themselves.

Having quotas protects against these issues and is all the more important in large multi-tenant clusters where a small set of badly behaved clients can degrade user experience for the well behaved ones.

In fact, when running Kafka as a service this even makes it possible to enforce API limits according to an agreed upon contract.

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Running IBM Event Streams on a laptop (sort of)

Friday, December 23rd, 2022

How to run a tiny local Kafka cluster using IBM Event Streams images

For local development on Kafka projects, I always run the public open source builds of ZooKeeper and Kafka as Java processes directly on my laptop (similar to steps described in the Apache Kafka Quickstart).

But for a project this week, I needed to verify something with the distribution of Kafka that comes with IBM Event Streams.

I used a simple Docker Compose setup for this. I’ll use this post to share how I did it.

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Setting up the Event Streams UI for developer-only use

Friday, December 9th, 2022

A quick tip for how to give a developer access to the IBM Event Streams UI only for the Kafka topics used by their application, and not everything else.

Imagine I’m a Kafka cluster admin. I’m running a cluster with a variety of topics on it.

Only viewing their own topics

One of my developers is responsible for the flight tracking app, and wants to use the Event Streams UI. But I don’t want them to be able to access the other sensitive topics for other applications.

I can create them their own login for the UI, that only lets them see their own topics.

The permissions I want to give them are:

- operation: Read
  resource:
    name: FLIGHT.
    patternType: prefix
    type: topic

(Remember, managing my Kafka cluster through Kubernetes resources is a good fit with a CI/CD workflow.)

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Using IBM DataStage to process JSON events on Apache Kafka topics

Monday, November 28th, 2022

In this post, I share a step-by-step guide for how to use IBM DataStage to merge JSON messages from multiple different Apache Kafka topics, into a single joined-up stream of events.

screenshot

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Setting up trusted SSL for IBM Event Streams

Thursday, October 27th, 2022

A quick how-to for setting up Event Streams with trusted certificates when running a development project.

Problem

You’re working on a project using IBM Event Streams. It’s just a development project, so you’re not using an SSL certificate signed by your real, trusted, corporate signer.

Everything works, but…

You get errors like these every time you access the web tooling – which you have to click through.

And you get errors like these from your Kafka client applications – which you have to configure with a custom truststore to avoid (although, if you do need to do that, I have a guide to help!)

[2021-06-27 23:19:06,048] ERROR [Consumer clientId=consumer-dalegrp-1, groupId=dalegrp] Connection to node -1 (dale-kafka-saslscram-bootstrap-strimzi.apps.eem-test-fest-6.cp.fyre.ibm.com/9.46.199.58:443) failed authentication due to: SSL handshake failed (org.apache.kafka.clients.NetworkClient)
[2021-06-27 23:19:06,049] WARN [Consumer clientId=consumer-dalegrp-1, groupId=dalegrp] Bootstrap broker dale-kafka-saslscram-bootstrap-strimzi.apps.eem-test-fest-6.cp.fyre.ibm.com:443 (id: -1 rack: null) disconnected (org.apache.kafka.clients.NetworkClient)
[2021-06-27 23:19:06,069] ERROR Error processing message, terminating consumer process:  (kafka.tools.ConsoleConsumer$)
org.apache.kafka.common.errors.SslAuthenticationException: SSL handshake failed
Caused by: javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.Alert.createSSLException(Alert.java:131)
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.TransportContext.fatal(TransportContext.java:326)
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.TransportContext.fatal(TransportContext.java:269)
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.TransportContext.fatal(TransportContext.java:264)
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.CertificateMessage$T13CertificateConsumer.checkServerCerts(CertificateMessage.java:1339)
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.CertificateMessage$T13CertificateConsumer.onConsumeCertificate(CertificateMessage.java:1214)
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.CertificateMessage$T13CertificateConsumer.consume(CertificateMessage.java:1157)
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.SSLHandshake.consume(SSLHandshake.java:392)
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.HandshakeContext.dispatch(HandshakeContext.java:444)
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.SSLEngineImpl$DelegatedTask$DelegatedAction.run(SSLEngineImpl.java:1074)
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.SSLEngineImpl$DelegatedTask$DelegatedAction.run(SSLEngineImpl.java:1061)
	at java.base/java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(AccessController.java:770)
	at java.base/sun.security.ssl.SSLEngineImpl$DelegatedTask.run(SSLEngineImpl.java:1008)

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Event Endpoint Management “demo in a box”

Friday, December 17th, 2021

In this post, I’ll share how you can get your own Event Endpoint Management demo instance with just seven minutes of work.

(Seven minutes of hands-on-keyboard time… there is a lot of waiting-for-stuff-to-run time, but it doesn’t sound so impressive if I include waiting time!)


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