Apache Kafka Windows Service Wrapper
We’ve started exploring different tools at work for dealing with increasing scale; focusing on using existing technology and enterprise integration patterns to build a solid foundation.
One we’ve been looking into lately is Apache Kafka; a high throughput distributed messaging system that inspired AWS Kinesis. Some of it’s benefits include:
- Cluster management within Apache Zookeeper
- Partitioning of messages across groups
- Replication and fault tolerance
- Strong ordering guarantees within a topic and partition
- Append only commit log semantics
- High throughput
One thing that was missing in the core project was a way to easily set up an instance on Windows for development.
To help with this we’ve written a Windows Service wrapper using TopShelf that upon starting:
- Downloads Kafka
- Adjusts the settings for a Windows environment
- Runs Zookeeper in a separate process
- Runs Kafka in a separate process
TopShelf then makes it easy to install and manage the service from the command line.
Check it out here: https://github.com/lukemerrett/Kafka-Windows-Service and feel free to contribute!