What integrations with Kafka have you worked on? How did you interact with the broker?

In Kafka integration projects, the typical components include:

• Producers — send messages to Kafka topics.
• Consumers — read messages from topics.

Interaction with the broker occurs through client libraries (e.g., kafka-python, kafka-node, librdkafka), which implement the Kafka protocol.

Key points:

• Configuring connection to brokers (addresses, ports).
• Defining topics for reading and writing.
• Managing offsets to ensure message delivery and processing.
• Error handling and retries.

Example in Python using kafka-python:

from kafka import KafkaProducer, KafkaConsumer

producer = KafkaProducer(bootstrap_servers='localhost:9092')
producer.send('my_topic', b'hello world')
producer.flush()

consumer = KafkaConsumer('my_topic', bootstrap_servers='localhost:9092', auto_offset_reset='earliest')
for message in consumer:
    print(f"Received: {message.value.decode('utf-8')}")

Embedded and IoT devices may use lightweight clients and protocols adapted for limited resources, such as Kafka REST Proxy or MQTT for integration with Kafka via bridges.