A literary gem – a portrait from life of Franz Kafka – now with an ardent preface by Francine Prose, avowed “fan of Janouch’s odd and beautiful book.” Gustav Janouch met Franz Kafka, the celebrated author of The Metamorphosis, as a seventeen-year-old fledgling poet. As Francine Prose notes in her wonderful preface, “they fell into the habit of taking long strolls through the city, strolls on which Kafka seems to have said many amazing, incisive, literary, and per- things to his companion and interlocutor, the teenage Boswell of Prague. Crossing a windswept square, apropos of something or other, Kafka tells Janouch, ‘Life is infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one’s personal experience. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.’” They talk about writing (Kafka’s own, but also that of his favorite writers: Poe, Kleist, and Rimbaud, who “transforms vowels into colors”) as well as technology, film, crime, Darwinism, Chinese philosophy, carpentry, insomnia, street fights, Hindu scripture, art, suicide, and prayer. “Prayer,” Kafka notes, brings “its infinite radiance to bed in the frail little cradle of one’s own existence.”

Every enterprise application creates data, whether it’s log messages, metrics, user activity, outgoing messages, or something else. And how to move all of this data becomes nearly as important as the data itself. If you’re an application architect, developer, or production engineer new to Apache Kafka, this practical guide shows you how to use this open source streaming platform to handle real-time data feeds. Engineers from Confluent and LinkedIn who are responsible for developing Kafka explain how to deploy production Kafka clusters, write reliable event-driven microservices, and build scalable stream-processing applications with this platform. Through detailed examples, you’ll learn Kafka’s design principles, reliability guarantees, key APIs, and architecture details, including the replication protocol, the controller, and the storage layer. Understand publish-subscribe messaging and how it fits in the big data ecosystem. Explore Kafka producers and consumers for writing and reading messages Understand Kafka patterns and use-case requirements to ensure reliable data delivery Get best practices for building data pipelines and applications with Kafka Manage Kafka in production, and learn to perform monitoring, tuning, and maintenance tasks Learn the most critical metrics among Kafka’s operational measurements Explore how Kafka’s stream delivery capabilities make it a perfect source for stream processing systems

The software architecture landscape has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Microservices have displaced monoliths. Data and applications are increasingly becoming distributed and decentralised. But composing disparate systems is a hard problem. More recently, software practitioners have been rapidly converging on event-driven architecture as a sustainable way of dealing with complexity - integrating systems without increasing their coupling.In Effective Kafka, Emil Koutanov explores the fundamentals of Event-Driven Architecture - using Apache Kafka - the world's most popular and supported open-source event streaming platform.You'll learn: - The fundamentals of event-driven architecture and event streaming platforms- The background and rationale behind Apache Kafka, its numerous potential uses and applications- The architecture and core concepts - the underlying software components, partitioning and parallelism, load-balancing, record ordering and consistency modes- Installation of Kafka and related tooling - using standalone deployments, clusters, and containerised deployments with Docker- Using CLI tools to interact with and administer Kafka classes, as well as publishing data and browsing topics- Using third-party web-based tools for monitoring a cluster and gaining insights into the event streams- Building stream processing applications in Java 11 using off-the-shelf client libraries- Patterns and best-practice for organising the application architecture, with emphasis on maintainability and testability of the resulting code- The numerous gotchas that lurk in Kafka's client and broker configuration, and how to counter them- Theoretical background on distributed and concurrent computing, exploring factors affecting their liveness and safety- Best-practices for running multi-tenanted clusters across diverse engineering teams, how teams collaborate to build complex systems at scale and equitably share the cluster with the aid of quotas- Operational aspects of running Kafka clusters at scale, performance tuning and methods for optimising network and storage utilisation- All aspects of Kafka security -including network segregation, encryption, certificates, authentication and authorization.The coverage is progressively delivered and carefully aimed at giving you a journey-like experience into becoming proficient with Apache Kafka and Event-Driven Architecture. The goal is to get you designing and building applications. And by the conclusion of this book, you will be a confident practitioner and a Kafka evangelist within your organisation - wielding the knowledge necessary to teach others.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the New York Times bestselling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and one of the world’s greatest storytellers comes "an insistently metaphysical mind-bender” (The New Yorker) about a teenager on the run and an aging simpleton. Now with a new introduction by the author. Here we meet 15-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura and the elderly Nakata, who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey. “As powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.... Reading Murakami ... is a striking experience in consciousness expansion.” —The Chicago Tribune