This is a guest post by Olivier Paugam, SW Architect for the Autodesk Cloud. I really like this post because it shows how bits of infrastructure--Mesos, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Akka, Splunk, Librato, EC2--can be combined together to solve real problems. It's truly amazing how much can get done these days by a small team.

I was tasked a few months ago to come up with a central eventing system, something that would allow our various backends to communicate with each other. We are talking about activity streaming backends, rendering, data translation, BIM, identity, log reporting, analytics, etc.  So something really generic with varying load, usage patterns and scaling profile.  And oh, also something that our engineering teams could interface with easily.  Of course every piece of the system should be able to scale on its own.

I obviously didn't have time to write too much code and picked up Kafka as our storage core as it's stable, widely used and works okay (please note I'm not bound to using it and could switch over to something else).  Now I of course could not expose it directly and had to front-end it with some API. Without thinking much I also rejected the idea of having my backend manage the offsets as it places too much constraint on how one deals with failures for instance.

So what did I end up with?