Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
Etsy on Migrating to Kafka (in three short years)
Search
Hakka Labs
January 22, 2015
Programming
4
6k
Etsy on Migrating to Kafka (in three short years)
Full post with video here:
Hakka Labs
January 22, 2015
Tweet
Share
More Decks by Hakka Labs
See All by Hakka Labs
New Workflows for Building Data Pipelines
hakka_labs
0
2.9k
Collaborative Topic Models for Users and Texts
hakka_labs
0
2.8k
Groupcache with Evan Owen
hakka_labs
2
5.4k
Testing Android at Spotify
hakka_labs
1
4.5k
It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature!
hakka_labs
0
3.2k
K-means Clustering to Understand Your Users
hakka_labs
0
2k
Building Amy: The Email-based Virtual Assistant by x.ai
hakka_labs
0
5k
Deep Learning and NLP Applications
hakka_labs
3
13k
Go and the Gophers
hakka_labs
2
11k
Other Decks in Programming
See All in Programming
アーキテクチャと考える迷子にならない開発者テスト
irof
9
3.3k
Level up your Gemini CLI - D&D Style!
palladius
1
120
「文字列→日付」の落とし穴 〜Ruby Date.parseの意外な挙動〜
sg4k0
0
310
AIを駆使して新しい技術を効率的に理解する方法
nogu66
1
660
社内オペレーション改善のためのTypeScript / TSKaigi Hokuriku 2025
dachi023
1
130
複数チーム並行開発下でのコード移行アプローチ ~手動 Codemod から「生成AI 活用」への進化
andpad
0
190
Flutterアプリ運用の現場で役立った監視Tips 5選
ostk0069
1
520
手軽に積ん読を増やすには?/読みたい本と付き合うには?
o0h
PRO
1
110
Vueで学ぶデータ構造入門 リンクリストとキューでリアクティビティを捉える / Vue Data Structures: Linked Lists and Queues for Reactivity
konkarin
1
350
詳細の決定を遅らせつつ実装を早くする
shimabox
2
1.3k
DartASTとその活用
sotaatos
2
150
知られているようで知られていない JavaScriptの仕様 4選
syumai
0
640
Featured
See All Featured
Improving Core Web Vitals using Speculation Rules API
sergeychernyshev
21
1.3k
Git: the NoSQL Database
bkeepers
PRO
432
66k
Keith and Marios Guide to Fast Websites
keithpitt
413
23k
4 Signs Your Business is Dying
shpigford
186
22k
Testing 201, or: Great Expectations
jmmastey
46
7.8k
Scaling GitHub
holman
464
140k
Faster Mobile Websites
deanohume
310
31k
The Myth of the Modular Monolith - Day 2 Keynote - Rails World 2024
eileencodes
26
3.2k
Connecting the Dots Between Site Speed, User Experience & Your Business [WebExpo 2025]
tammyeverts
10
680
A Modern Web Designer's Workflow
chriscoyier
697
190k
Being A Developer After 40
akosma
91
590k
Fireside Chat
paigeccino
41
3.7k
Transcript
Migrating to Kafka in Three Short Years A look at
the choices that defined the Etsy analytics stack
None
Path Dependence
Decisions made in the past limit options in the present,
even if the circumstances under which those past decisions were made are no longer relevant.
In other words, we can’t upgrade the Hadoop cluster until
we port all of the Cascading.jruby jobs to Scalding.
Sneak Preview ! 1. How Etsy built its original analytics
stack 2. Handling changes prepared us to rebuild our data pipeline 3. Kafka!
Starting from scratch
Choice #1 ! Acquire Adtuitive
None
None
Before you can work on search, you need real analytics
Choice #2 ! Build a zero-impact analytics stack
Etsy is not a cloud company but the first analytics
stack was cloud-based
(illustration here) browser CDN EMR S3 mysql FTP
Legacy effects: ! 24 hour latency on events 48 hour
latency on visits
Choice #3 ! Cascading.jruby
Hadoop Cascading Cascading.jruby
Choice #4 ! Use GA _utma cookie to define visits
Benefits: ! •Simpler ETL •Visits computed on the client side
•Easy to reconcile against Google Analytics
Choice #5 ! Using existing feature library for A/B tests
Leveraged existing experience with operational ramp-ups
Low impact: just required a logging change
Choice #6 ! Build analytics stack around visit-level metrics
Great for search and ads, less great for measuring engagement
Changing the tires without stopping the car
How do we instrument the iOS app? Summer 2012
1. Native app visits should have the same structure as
Web visits
2. Native app events should use the existing data pipeline
3. The native app should buffer events and send them
when convenient
Solution: ! 1. App uploads bundles of events to API
endpoint 2. Backend event logger curls the beacon for every event
Side effect: ! We have a backend event logger that
is now used all over the place
CDN diversification project Fall 2012
None
Migrated to our own beacon infrastructure
Data pipeline based on Apache, PHP, logrotate, and cron
We built our own Hadoop cluster: Etsydoop Fall 2012
We hired the Scalding guy Fall 2012
Hadoop Cascading Cascading.jruby Scalding
None
Uh oh, the Google Analytics JS hurts performance Fall 2012
The event logger’s GA dependency precluded async loading, hurting performance
First idea: duplicate the _utma functionality in our own code
The trouble with backend events
Visit Time Logger Event Type 1 12:01 frontend home 1
12:03 backend login 1 12:03 frontend view listing 1 1:31 backend logout 2 1:31 frontend view listing 2 1:32 frontend search 2 1:33 frontend view listing wrong visit
Complete rewrite of our ETL jobs Spring/Summer 2013
None
Backend page-view events Fall 2013
None
2014: the next phase
EventPipe goals
Use POST rather than multiple GET requests to prevent data
loss
Use JSON rather than query strings for comprehensibility
Validate beacon data before it enters the data pipeline
Use a binary serialization format for long-term storage
Use Kafka for data transfer to escape the batch paradigm
Eliminate individual beacon servers as points of failure
How do we handle the impedance mismatch between Apache/PHP and
Kafka?
Wrote a server in Go to serialize beacons in Thrift
and send them to Kafka
Use Apache for SSL termination
Still to come
Real-ish time ETL
Streaming infrastructure
Offline processing for more products
Other Kafka applications
Takeaways
Every choice you make has long-term implications
Fixing stuff creates new opportunities
@rafeco http://rc3.org