At PayPal, our Kafka journey, which started with a handful of isolated Kafka clusters, now has us marching at a rapid pace towards a trillion messages per day in a true multi-tenant Kafka environment with thousands of brokers. To enable that tremendous growth -- which today is reflected by 30% quarter-on-quarter increases in traffic volume -- we’ve had to overcome a wide variety of challenges, including:

Deploying the tooling required to operate multiple Kafka clusters at scale

Monitoring and operating a large fleet of brokers across multiple availability zones

Identifying the right set of metrics to monitor and then finding a way to automate remediation

Troubleshooting customer issues related to broker connectivity and data loss

Planning and optimizing capacity within budget constraints

Managing a polyglot client stack with a diverse set of Kafka client libraries

And of course, doing all of the above while ensuring compliance with the stringent data security requirements mandated for FinTech companies

In this talk, we will describe the Kafka deployment model at PayPal and how we addressed these challenges to implement event streaming at enterprise scale. Independent of the scale of your Kafka deployment – be it a large enterprise already using Kafka, a midsize company in the midst of transforming your Big Data platform, or a small but rapidly growing company just getting started with Kafka – this talk will provide you with knowledge of the ins and outs of operating Kafka at scale, learn the challenges you can expect, and understand how you can address them will help you pave the way for your own Kafka journey.