Kafka is the tool used in this blog to demonstrate ingestion, buffering, and decoupled pipelines.
Recommended path (local and free)
Use Docker so the setup is reproducible.
Workflow
- Start the stack with
docker compose up. - Create a topic.
- Produce a few messages.
- Consume and verify.
What to measure (for performance topics)
- Throughput (messages/second).
- Consumer lag.
- End‑to‑end latency.