Hands On Kafka Course

Kafka Mastery: Building StreamSocial

A 60-Day Intensive Course in Event-Driven Systems

Course Overview

Build StreamSocial, a production-ready social media analytics platform handling 50M requests/second. Master Apache Kafka through hands-on development of real-time trend analysis, personalized feeds, fraud detection, and global-scale event processing.

Learning Objectives

• Design and implement high-throughput event-driven architectures

• Master Kafka's distributed systems concepts (partitioning, replication, fault tolerance)

• Build scalable producers and consumers with reliability guarantees

• Implement real-time stream processing with Kafka Streams

• Deploy production-ready Kafka clusters with monitoring and security

• Architect microservices using event-driven patterns

Prerequisites

• Java 17+ (intermediate proficiency)

• Docker & Docker Compose

• Maven/Gradle build tools

• IDE (IntelliJ IDEA recommended)

• Basic networking concepts

• Command line familiarity

Course Structure

Format: 12 lessons
Duration: 2-3 hours per lesson
Approach: Theory + Hands-on coding + Production insights

Each lesson includes:

• Concept Deep Dive (30 min)

• StreamSocial Implementation (90 min)

• Production Insights (15 min)

• Daily Challenge (coding task)

Course Curricullum Modules

Module 1: Foundation & Core Concepts

• Lesson 1: Event-Driven Architecture & Kafka Foundations (Days 1–5)

• Lesson 2: Consumer Scalability, Reliability & Delivery Semantics (Days 6–10)

Module 2: Producer Reliability & Performance

• Lesson 3: Producer Reliability, Ordering & Partitioning (Days 11–15)

• Lesson 4: Throughput Optimization, Transactions & Replication (Days 16–20)

Module 3: Advanced Consumer Patterns

• Week 5: Advanced Consumer Design & Error Handling (Days 21–25)

• Week 6: Schema Evolution, Serialization & Log Compaction (Days 26–30)

Module 4: Data Integration & Kafka Connect

• Lesson 7: Kafka Connect Foundations & Data Pipelines (Days 31–35)

• Lesson 8: Connect Observability, CDC & Database Integration (Days 36–40)

Module 5: Stream Processing with Kafka Streams

• Lesson 9: Kafka Streams Fundamentals & Stateless Processing (Days 41–45)

• Lesson 10: Stateful Stream Processing & Interactive Queries (Days 46–50)

Module 6: Production Operations & Security

• Lesson 11: Monitoring, Logging & Kafka Security (Days 51–56)

• Lesson 12: Event-Driven Microservices & Production Readiness (Days 57–60)

Assessment & Certification

Daily Assessments

• Coding Challenges (60 total)

• Concept Quizzes (12 module quizzes)

• System Design Reviews (weekly)

Final Project

Complete StreamSocial system capable of:

• Processing 50M requests/second

• 80%)

• Deploy working StreamSocial system

• Present system architecture and design decisions

Resources & Tools

Required Software

• Java 17+ with Maven/Gradle

• Docker Desktop with 8GB+ RAM allocation

• IntelliJ IDEA Community/Ultimate

• Apache Kafka 3.5+

• Confluent Platform (optional)

Development Environment

• Minimum: 16GB RAM, 4-core CPU, 100GB storage

• Recommended: 32GB RAM, 8-core CPU, 500GB SSD

Supporting Materials

• Course GitHub repository with starter code

• Docker Compose templates

• Monitoring dashboard templates

• Schema registry configurations

• Production deployment guides

Expected Outcomes

Upon completion, you will:

• Build production-ready event-driven systems at scale

• Design fault-tolerant distributed architectures

• Implement real-time stream processing applications

• Deploy secure, monitored Kafka clusters

• Architect microservices with event-driven patterns

• Handle 50M+ requests/second with confidence

Career Impact: Qualify for Senior Software Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Platform Engineer roles focusing on distributed systems and real-time data processing.