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Lab - Programmatic interaction with Apache Kafka from Go

In the labs 3, 5 and 6, you have produced and consumed messages from Node, Python and Java respectively. In this lab, you will also produce and consume messages in a programmatic way, from Go. You will use the Apache Kafka platform that you used in earlier labs as well as the Go(lang) run time environment that is also part of the Gitpod workspace.

Go interacting with Apache Kafka

Several libraries are available for interaction with Apache Kafka from Go. See this list on the Apache Kafka website. Then there is also Franz-Go with 1K stars on GitHub. The most popular seems to be Sarama (10K stars). We will use that library in this lab: "Package sarama is a pure Go client library for dealing with Apache Kafka (versions 0.8 and later). It includes a high-level API for easily producing and consuming messages, and a low-level API for controlling bytes on the wire when the high-level API is insufficient. Usage examples for the high-level APIs are provided inline with their full documentation."

The sources for this part of the lab are in the directory lab7-go-and-kafka.

Producing to test-topic in Go

The documentation for the Sarama Kafka package states: To produce messages, use either the AsyncProducer or the SyncProducer. The AsyncProducer accepts messages on a channel and produces them asynchronously in the background as efficiently as possible; it is preferred in most cases. The SyncProducer provides a method which will block until Kafka acknowledges the message as produced. This can be useful but comes with two caveats: it will generally be less efficient, and the actual durability guarantees depend on the configured value of Producer.RequiredAcks. There are configurations where a message acknowledged by the SyncProducer can still sometimes be lost.

In directory lab7-go-and-kafka\go-producer is the source of a Go program main.go that uses the package to produce messages to a Kafka topic. The code is quite straightforward:

  • import of Sarama package (leveraging the dependency defined in file go.mod)
  • define configuration details - broker endpoints and topic name
  • call setUpProducer to create a new AsyncProducer (using the configuration values)
  • call function produceMessages to produce a stream of messages to the Kafka Topic through the AsyncProducer; to stop the program you have to interrupt it

Now run the Producer application to publish messages to the Kafka Topic from the Go program, using these two statements:

go mod tidy

and

go run main.go

To stop the production of messages, you have to stop the program.

Consuming messages from test-topic in Go

The file main.go in directory lab7-go-and-kafka\go-consumer contains the code for the Go Kafka consumer. The dependency on the Sarama package is defined in go.mod. To consume messages, run the following commands in the directory lab7-go-and-kafka\go-consumer.

go mod tidy
go run main.go

The code in main.go contains several sections:

  • in the var section right after the imports are the definitions of the broker endpoints, the topic name, the consumer group id and the oldest strategy that indicates whether only new or all messages should be consumer from the topic (the value of boolean oldest is translated in the statement: config.Consumer.Offsets.Initial = sarama.OffsetOldest; the default for Offsets.Initial is OffsetNewest )
  • near the end of the program he function ConsumeClaim - part of the type ConsumerGroupHandler's interface handles messages retrieved from the Kafka Topic(s); this is where additional custom logic regarding message processing can be added.
  • type Consumer is defined to be the ConsumerGroupHandler
  • the call to sarama.NewConsumerGroup creates the client - a new consumer group with the given broker addresses and configuration.
  • the call to function Consume on the client (the consumer group) passes the Consumer (ConsumerGroupHandler) that implements function ConsumeClaim that will be invoked to handle the messages retrieved the by client

Resources

Wiki on Sarana Go package for Kafka: https://github.com/Shopify/sarama/wiki

Regular user documentation is provided via godoc: https://godoc.org/github.com/Shopify/sarama