Having to take vacation (we were asked to do so, to prevent all of us taking all of our vacations towards the end of the year) also gives nice free time for online courses (especially with Covid-19 around), and so I took another one (and will take the next one now), again on Udemy (see my previous post on a nice Akka course).
This one was on the basics of Kafka, which I took because we are using Kafka in our company only very carefully and in selected places because the overall knowledge is not completely “there” yet. By taking this course I hoped (successfully, as it turns out) to at least make a small step into adding more Kafka knowledge to our environment. It’s called “Learn Apache Kafka for Beginners v2” from Stephane Maarek, a nice french guy (bonus points for the nice french accent, while still being perfectly understandable).
Besides learning all the basics about Kafka – which this course explains very good and in detail – this course allowed me to get a better grasp about the use cases for Kafka and the differences to RabbitMq (which we use primarily at my job). I will not go into details – many other people have done so more detailled than I would1 2 3, but knowing these differences will probably help me to make the right choice for each upcoming use cases.
To be honest, I’m a bit excited about using Kafka more in a productive environment now, let’s hope I get a chance to do that in the future 😉
In the end, this course got its deserved 5 stars from me and I can recommend this guy, he really seems to know what he’s talking about.
Obviously a beginner’s course can only go so far, so I already got some of the follow-up courses from the same guy about Cluster Setup and Administration, Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect, which I will do in the next few weeks (probably after the Elasticsearch course I am currently in is done).
P.S. No, I don’t get any money from Udemy for talking about them (and I wouldn’t want any, this blog is private and non-commercial and it will stay this way).