Kafka CDC for Event Driven Architectures

Apps built around event-driven architectures often divide functionality across multiple services, each of which may have its own database or file storage. This division of responsibility allows databases to be chosen and optimized for specific use cases; a data lake has different concerns than a transaction processing system.

However, this separation creates a challenge—how can services share data quickly and reliably to maintain consistency?

Change data capture (CDC) is a widely used solution. CDC is a data integration and replication technique that captures changes in a source database and propagates them to one or more target databases. CDC is often used in scenarios requiring near-real-time data synchronization.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at CDC, with a particular focus on change data capture with Kafka.

What is Kafka?

Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform designed to handle high volume, high throughput, and low-latency streaming data. It is deployed as a cluster of brokers that manage the storage and distribution of messages between producers and consumers, which publish and retrieve the messages.

Kafka allows for the creation of fault-tolerant, scalable, and distributed applications that can process and analyze real-time data.

How Does Kafka CDC Work?

Kafka is ideal for CDC processes. As a data streaming solution, it can receive messages containing changes from the source database and publish them to Kafka consumers, which can then apply those changes to the target databases.

CDC with Kafka can be broken down into the following steps:

For example, in a FinTech application, when a user makes a transaction, it is stored in a database.  The CDC tool captures the change and publishes the transaction details as a message to a Kafka topic. The target database, which may be part of a fraud detection or credit assessment system, consumes the message from the Kafka topic and updates its records accordingly.

The Benefits of Using Kafka for CDC

Change data capture with Kafka offers several advantages. Kafka is designed to handle high volume data streams, making it an ideal platform for CDC in large-scale applications. It enables near-real-time synchronization of the source and target databases, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies.

Because Kafka provides pre-built connectors for various data sources, it is easy to integrate CDC with new and existing systems and applications. Additionally, Kafka libraries are available for many programming languages, making it straightforward to create producers and consumers in the preferred language of each project.

Streamdal and Kafka CDC

Streamdal’s Streaming Data Performance Monitoring (SDPM) platform connects to CDC streams from Kafka, allowing users to take advantage of a wide range of streaming data monitoring capabilities, including semantic data monitoring, anomaly and PII detection, and data replays to any destination.

Get started with Streamdal today, or book a demonstration to learn more.