OpenTelemetry at Scale: Using Kafka to handle bursty traffic
I heard several times that Kafka was put in front of elasticsearch clusters for handling traffic burst. You can also use Redpanda, Pulsar, NATS and other distributed queues.<p>One thing that is also very interesting with Kafka is that you can achieve exactly-once semantic without too much efforts: by keeping track of the positions of partitions in your own database and carefully acknowledging them when you are sure data is safely stored in your db. That's what we did with our engine Quickwit, so far it's the most efficient way to index data in it.<p>One obvious drawback with Kafka is that it's one more piece to maintain... and it's not a small one.