Upgrade to PRO for Only $50/Year—Limited-Time Offer! 🔥
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
ID管理機能開発の裏側 高速にSaaS連携を実現したチームのAI活用編
atzzcokek
0
210
SwiftUIで本格音ゲー実装してみた
hypebeans
0
110
20251127_ぼっちのための懇親会対策会議
kokamoto01_metaps
2
420
ViewファーストなRailsアプリ開発のたのしさ
sugiwe
0
440
20 years of Symfony, what's next?
fabpot
2
350
UIデザインに役立つ 2025年の最新CSS / The Latest CSS for UI Design 2025
clockmaker
18
7.3k
React Native New Architecture 移行実践報告
taminif
1
150
AIコーディングエージェント(skywork)
kondai24
0
150
AIエージェントを活かすPM術 AI駆動開発の現場から
gyuta
0
370
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
170
新卒エンジニアのプルリクエスト with AI駆動
fukunaga2025
0
200
Cap'n Webについて
yusukebe
0
130
Featured
See All Featured
The Illustrated Children's Guide to Kubernetes
chrisshort
51
51k
Fantastic passwords and where to find them - at NoRuKo
philnash
52
3.5k
Large-scale JavaScript Application Architecture
addyosmani
515
110k
Why Our Code Smells
bkeepers
PRO
340
57k
Performance Is Good for Brains [We Love Speed 2024]
tammyeverts
12
1.3k
Fight the Zombie Pattern Library - RWD Summit 2016
marcelosomers
234
17k
Evolution of real-time – Irina Nazarova, EuRuKo, 2024
irinanazarova
9
1.1k
Stop Working from a Prison Cell
hatefulcrawdad
273
21k
Context Engineering - Making Every Token Count
addyosmani
9
500
How to Create Impact in a Changing Tech Landscape [PerfNow 2023]
tammyeverts
55
3.1k
Writing Fast Ruby
sferik
630
62k
Rebuilding a faster, lazier Slack
samanthasiow
84
9.3k
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