This will be a very brief overview of our 2024 HackUTD hackathon project.
There were a couple of very interesting sponsor prompts, and I'm still
a little sad we never got the chance to use Pinata, we ultimately went
with PNC's prompt, to build tooling for observability and data lifetimes.
Of course, the word "observability" and "lifetimes" immediately caused us
to think of Kafka. So, for our project, we decided to build a platform to
model and display our end to end life cycle of our data cleanly and
efficiently. To that end, with only one all-nighter pulled. We produced
Sauron (a very clever name I came up with my self, thank you very
much). Here is a link of
a demo that due to time
constraints we had to make before we could fully hook it up the Confluents
instance that we were simulating our ETL on. And here is the GitHub repo
Briefly, we used Terraform to spin up a Confluents instance, as well as several small python cli programs (orchestrated over k8) which acted as modular consumer-producers to simulate micro-services in our pipeline. We utilized some minimal (and very under documented) OpenTelemetry python instrumentation, written directly into the service, which hooked up to a Jaeger instance (also deployed on k8). Finally, we somehow (I was asleep) relayed the Jaeger data into our front end, which you could see in the video.
Overall it was a very good, although exhausting hackathon, and we produced a very interesting project. I learned a lot, and was definitely the most hands on experience that I've had with Kafka.