I need to receive messages to my BigQuery tables and I want to know what is the best way to consume those messages.
My Kafka servers who are at AWS they produce AVRO messages and from what I saw Dataflow needs receive JSON format messages. So I googled and found an article explaining how to receive messages to PubSub, but on PubSub what I only see in this type of architecture, they create a Kafka VM on GCP to produce the messages.
What I need to know is:
It's possible to receive AVRO messages on PubSub from external Kafka Servers and then deserialize the message using my Schema, sending it to Dataflow and finally send it to BigQuery tables?
Or do I need to create a Kafka VM and use it to consume messages from external servers?
This might seem a bit confusing but it is what I am feeling right now. The main goal here is to get messages from Kafka (AVRO format) at AWS and put them on BigQuery tables. If you have any suggestions they are very welcomed
Thanks a lot in advance
The Kafka Connect BigQuery Connector may be exactly what you need. It is a Kafka sink connector that allows you to export messages from Kafka directly to BigQuery. The README page provides detailed configuration instructions, including how to let the connector recognize your Kafka queue and how to enter the information for the destination BigQuery table. This connector should be able to retrieve the AVRO schema automatically from your Kafka project.
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I have a requirement to read messages from a topic, enrich the message based on provided configuration (data required for enrichment is sourced from external systems), and publish the enriched message to an output topic. Messages on both source and output topics should be Avro format.
Is this a good use case for a custom Kafka Connector or should I use Kafka Streams?
Why I am considering Kafka Connect?
Lightweight in terms of code and deployment
Configuration driven
Connection and error handling
Scalability
I like the plugin based approach in Connect. If there is a new type of message that needs to be handled I just deploy a new connector without having to deploy a full scale Java app.
Why I am not sure this is good candidate for Kafka Connect?
Calls to external system
Can Kafka be both source and sink for a connector?
Can we use Avro schemas in connectors?
Performance under load
Cannot do stateful processing (currently there is no requirement)
I have experience with Kafka Streams but not with Connect
Use both?
Use Kafka Connect to source external database into a topic.
Use Kafka Streams to build that topic into a stream/table that can then be manipulated.
Use Kafka Connect to sink back into a database, or other system other than Kafka, as necessary.
Kafka Streams can also be config driven, use plugins (i.e. reflection), is just as scalable, and has no different connection modes (to Kafka). Performance should be the similar. Error handling is really the only complex part. ksqlDB is entirely "config driven" via SQL statements, and can connect to external Connect clusters, or embed its own.
Avro works for both, yes.
Some connectors are temporarily stateful, as they build in-memory batches, such as S3 or JDBC sink connectors
Kafka Streams is good, but I have to do every configuration very manual. Instead Kafka Connect provides its API interface, which is very useful for handling the configuration, as well as Tasks, Workers, etc...
Thus, I'm thinking of using Kafka Connect for my simple data transforming service. Basically, the service will read the data from a topic and send the transformed data to another topic. In order to do that, I have to make a custom Sink Connector to send the transformed data to the kafka topic, however, it seems those interface functions aren't available in SinkConnector. If I can do it, that would be great since I can manage tasks, workers via the REST API and running the tasks under a distributed mode (multiple instances).
There are 2 options in my mind:
Figuring out how to send the message from SinkConnector to a kafka topic
Figuring out how to build a REST interface API like Kafka Connect which wraps up the Kafka Streams app
Any ideas?
Figuring out how to send the message from SinkConnector to a kafka topic
A sink connector consumes data/messages from a Kafka topic. If you want to send data to a Kafka topic you are likely talking about a source connector.
Figuring out how to build a REST interface API like Kafka Connect which wraps up the Kafka Streams app.
using the kafka-connect-archtype you can have a template to create your own Kafka connector (source or sink). In your case that you want to build some stream processing pipeline after the connector, you are mostly talking about a connector of another stream processing engine that is not Kafka-stream. There are connectors for Kafka <-> Spark, Kafka <-> Flink, ...
But you can build your using the template of kafka-connect-archtype if you want. Use the MySourceTask List<SourceRecord> poll() method or the MySinkTask put(Collection<SinkRecord> records) method to process the records as stream. They extend the org.apache.kafka.connect.[source.SourceTask|sink.SinkTask] from Kafka connect.
a REST interface API like Kafka Connect which wraps up the Kafka Streams app
This is exactly what KsqlDB allows you to do
Outside of creating streams and tables with SQL queries, it offers a REST API as well as can interact with Connect endpoints (or embed a Connect worker itself)
https://docs.ksqldb.io/en/latest/concepts/connectors/
I have an app that produces an array of messages in raw JSON periodically. I was able to convert that to Avro using the avro-tools. I did that because I needed the messages to include schema due to the limitations of Kafka-Connect JDBC sink. I can open this file on notepad++ and see that it includes the schema and a few lines of data.
Now I would like to send this to my central Kafka Broker and then use Kafka Connect JDBC sink to put the data in a database. I am having a hard time understanding how I should be sending these Avro files I have to my Kafka Broker. Do I need a schema registry for my purposes? I believe Kafkacat does not support Avro so I suppose I will have to stick with the kafka-producer.sh that comes with the Kafka installation (please correct me if I am wrong).
Question is: Can someone please share the steps to produce my Avro file to a Kafka broker without getting Confluent getting involved.
Thanks,
To use the Kafka Connect JDBC Sink, your data needs an explicit schema. The converter that you specify in your connector configuration determines where the schema is held. This can either be embedded within the JSON message (org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter with schemas.enabled=true) or held in the Schema Registry (one of io.confluent.connect.avro.AvroConverter, io.confluent.connect.protobuf.ProtobufConverter, or io.confluent.connect.json.JsonSchemaConverter).
To learn more about this see https://www.confluent.io/blog/kafka-connect-deep-dive-converters-serialization-explained
To write an Avro message to Kafka you should serialise it as Avro and store the schema in the Schema Registry. There is a Go client library to use with examples
without getting Confluent getting involved.
It's not entirely clear what you mean by this. The Kafka Connect JDBC Sink is written by Confluent. The best way to manage schemas is with the Schema Registry. If you don't want to use the Schema Registry then you can embed the schema in your JSON message but it's a suboptimal way of doing things.
I'm developing a Kafka Sink connector on my own. My deserializer is JSONConverter. However, when someone send a wrong JSON data into my connector's topic, I want to omit this record and send this record to a specific topic of my company.
My confuse is: I can't find any API for me to get my Connect's bootstrap.servers.(I know it's in the confluent's etc directory but it's not a good idea to write hard code of the directory of "connect-distributed.properties" to get the bootstrap.servers)
So question, is there another way for me to get the value of bootstrap.servers conveniently in my connector program?
Instead of trying to send the "bad" records from a SinkTask to Kafka, you should instead try to use the dead letter queue feature that was added in Kafka Connect 2.0.
You can configure the Connect runtime to automatically dump records that failed to be processed to a configured topic acting as a DLQ.
For more details, see the KIP that added this feature.
I have a system pushing Avro data in to multiple Kafka topics.
I want to push that data to HDFS. I came across confluent but am not sure how can I send data to HDFS without starting kafka-avro-console-producer.
Steps I performed:
I have my own Kafka and ZooKeeper running so i just started schema registry of confluent.
I started kafka-connect-hdfs after changing topic name.
This step is also successful. It's able to connect to HDFS.
After this I started pushing data to Kafka but the messages were not being pushed to HDFS.
Please help. I'm new to Confluent.
You can avoid using the kafka-avro-console-producer and use your own producer to send messages to the topics, but we strongly encourage you to use the Confluent Schema Registry (https://github.com/confluentinc/schema-registry) to manage your schemas and use the Avro serializer that is bundled with the Schema Registry to keep your Avro data consistent. There's a nice writeup on the rationale for why this is a good idea to do here.
If you are able to send messages that were produced with the kafka-avro-console-producer to HDFS, then your problem is likely in the kafka-connect-hdfs connector not being able to deserialize the data. I assume you are going through the quickstart guide. The best results will come from you using the same serializer on both sides (in and out of Kafka) if you are intending to write Avro to HDFS. How this process works is described in this documentation.