Gofka is a dependency free drop-in replacement for Kafka written in Go. Although still in its early development stages, the requirements are well defined:

• Self-contained
• Fast and efficient
• Distributed, fault-tolerant and scalable
• Data compatible with the Kafka data formats
• Wire compatible with the Kafka protocol

Kafka is a high-throughput publish-subscribe messaging system rethough as a distributed commit log.

Kafka is an incredible piece of software enginneering with many many man months of deep and subtle thinking put into it. I owe a lot to the team behind it!

This raises the question: Why Gofka?

When you're a JVM shop, with a JVM stack, this might come as natural. However, despite having experience with some of this, I'm moving more and more into the Go stack. Distributed systems development in Go has seen the recent adoption of The Raft Consensus Algorithm which with the right implementation, solves all problems Kafka had to solve using Zookeeper. This means Gofka can be 100% dependency free.

Without deep expertise, the JVM is a hassle to operate and deploy. It is very important for Kafka to control its memory footprint and layout which is also quite a challange using the JVM. With Go the only artifact to be shipped and managed is an executable binary (besides configuration, monitoring, etc... which is orthogonal to this point). Also, despite being a garbage collected language, the programmer has control over the memory layout.

After Jay Kreps' article entitled The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction, I fell in love with the ideas behind Kafka and decided to deeply understand and improve them. That's what led to this project!

The project is very very early stage at this point. Contributions are only welcome if their design and rationale is thoroughly discussed first.

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2014 Tomás Senart

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