I am trying to find a way to consume messages that being sent by a websocket to a kafka topic (the messages are sent by the websocket to the address 'ws://address:port/topic_name' and I want to add all of those messages to a kafka topic). I read about kafka connect and tried to find a way to do it with it but it doesnt seem to work... thanks in advance :)
3 Answers
There is no Kafka Connector to a socket in Confluent Platform.
I work in a team that use Kafka in production and our source is a socket, so your options are to use platforms that support this socket->Kafka producing, or write one by yourself.
About possible platforms, I think most of them will be overkill though you can utilize them for this problem, some options are:
1. NiFi or MiniFi for smaller loads, use PublishKafka Processor
2. StreamSets with Kafka Producer Destination
3. Apache Flume- not very recommended, this project is stops to evolve.
If you wish to write your own producer, you basically have to create a listener on this port, and produce the incoming messages to Kafka; if this is a web socket, just get the payload of the requests and produce them to Kafka.
Example Kafka Producer Code can be copied from tutorialspoint simple producer example*
Here are some open-source projects examples:
1. https://github.com/DataReply/kafka-connect-socket-source
2. https://github.com/kafka-socket/miniature_engine
3. https://github.com/dhanuka84/kafka-connect-tcp
4. https://github.com/krux/tcp-stream-kafka-producer
The idea of Kafka connect is that you have some sort of external integration that serves as storage. This can be SAP, Salesforce, RDBMS, MQ or anything else that has state. You websocket endpoint does not have data, you can not poll it it is someone else that is invoking it and there fore the data is transfered. Now if you know who is actualy holding the data than you can potentialy build a conector using this guide. https://docs.confluent.io/current/connect/devguide.html
For your particular case, the best you can do is either to use Kafka Producer API https://docs.confluent.io/current/clients/producer.html
and from your websocket enpoint use this producer to post a message to the topic, or even better if you are using spring you can use a higher level abstraction, that will be KafkaTemplate https://docs.spring.io/spring-kafka/reference/html/#sending-messages.
Full disclosure: I work for MigratoryData.
You can check out MigratoryData's solution for Kafka. MigratoryData is a scalable WebSocket server. The MigratoryData Source/Sink Connector for Kafka makes use of Kafka Connect API and can be used to stream data in real-time from Kafka to WebSocket clients and vice versa. The main advantage of the solution is it extends Kafka messaging to WebSocket clients while preserving Kafka's key features like guaranteed delivery, message ordering, etc.
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