Event-Driven Architecture with Apache Kafka: Python and Docker Hands-On

Course Overview

Welcome to the ultimate hands-on guide to Apache Kafka! In this course, you will transition from a traditional request-response mindset to designing highly scalable, event-driven architectures. You will learn to build, run, and test a complete real-time streaming data pipeline from scratch.

What You'll Learn

• Kafka Core Architecture: Understand topics, partitions, brokers, and how Kafka achieves high throughput and fault tolerance.
• Dockerized Setup: Spin up Kafka and Zookeeper/KRaft containers seamlessly using Docker Compose.
• Hands-on Python Integration: Write production-ready Kafka Producers and Consumers using Python.
• Command Line Operations: Master the Kafka CLI to monitor, troubleshoot, and manage your streaming data.
• AI Pipeline Concepts: Discover how event-driven streams connect to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems using Vector Embeddings and a Vector Store.

Target Audience & Prerequisites

• Target Audience: Beginner developers and backend engineers who want to build distributed systems.
• Prerequisites: Basic Python programming knowledge, an OpenAI API key (for optional AI integrations), and familiarity with Docker.

Tools & Technologies Used

• Apache Kafka & Zookeeper
• Docker & Docker Compose
• Python (with confluent-kafka library)
• PyCharm IDE
• ChromaDB & OpenAI API (for downstream RAG pipelines)