Small, independently deployable microservices are great – until you need to integrate a data-streaming technology like Kafka. Suddenly, your team is writing custom connectors, bespoke code, and complicated ACL configurations just to get events from Point A (Kafka) to Point B (a microservice consuming HTTP, WebSocket or SSE). This swirl of code can slow your time to market and balloon your operational overhead significantly.
Wouldn’t it be better if you could use Kafka to bring robust event streaming to your microservices architecture, minus the custom bridges and other integration headaches? Doing so reduces complexity and empowers you to deliver faster. Read on to discover how.
The problem: Custom Kafka bridges weigh you down
Kafka has become the go-to streaming platform for event-driven and microservices architectures for good reason: it excels at ingesting and distributing real-time data. However, embracing the benefits of Kafka means facing multiple inherent challenges.
First, there’s the problem of hooking Kafka into HTTP or WebSocket environments. Most teams tackle this by writing custom microservices that act as bridges. These microservices consume Kafka topics, transform messages, then emit data to REST endpoints, SSE endpoints or WebSocket channels. It’s a time-consuming approach where each custom microservice adds another potential point of failure. If messages aren’t appearing at their destination, you lose even more time chasing logs across multiple services, containers and even teams.
The result is an architecture bloated with integration code that you have to test, monitor and constantly update. Every new feature or external partner triggers yet another development cycle – hardly a strong foundation for a dynamic, scalable enterprise.
Then there’s the issue of the security and governance overhead. Kafka’s native ACLs aren’t always intuitive at scale. It’s tricky to standardize or monitor who can publish, subscribe, or transform the data, especially across dozens of microservices or partner integrations.
On top of all this, there’s the fact that operating Kafka well requires knowledge of brokers, partitions, consumer groups and ACLs. In addition to this specialized skill set, developers also need to learn or maintain specialized Kafka client libraries across multiple languages. The costs of this to your business can quickly mount up.
The business benefits of eliminating custom Kafka code
If you eliminate the code-heavy custom bridges from your Kafka integration (we’ll show you how in a moment), you stand to gain some notable benefits. You reduce deployment overhead, simplify debugging and free your team to focus on real business logic.
Faster integration and fewer custom microservices to maintain also means you can reduce your time-to-market and operational costs. Throw in a single governance model, where you unify your Kafka feeds with the rest of your microservices architecture under a single API management layer, and you gain even more.
How? With Tyk Streams – a game-changing way to expose and govern Kafka data without writing (and maintaining) specialized integration logic.
The Tyk Streams solution
Tyk Streams transforms the way you handle Kafka data. Instead of building and deploying standalone microservices to adapt Kafka to HTTP protocols, Tyk Streams manages this translation under the hood. You can configure a new Kafka topic or adjust a transformation via an interface-driven process, without needing Git repos, build pipelines or microservice deployments. You gain the ability to iterate rapidly, along with scalable governance – as your microservices ecosystem grows, Tyk Streams scales with you. You can add multiple teams or partner channels without descending into ACL chaos, thanks to Tyk’s centralized control.
Several key features are behind this innovative way to harness the power of Kafka, minus the headaches. They include:
Broker-native features, unified access
Tyk Streams respects Kafka’s native concepts, like consumer groups, delivery guarantees and persistence. Rather than forcing you to redesign your data flows, Tyk Streams integrates at the broker level and exposes the data via HTTP, WebSocket, or SSE. This lets your other services consume events in familiar protocols they’re already equipped to handle.
Configuration over code
Instead of writing custom logic, use the Tyk Dashboard to configure a new stream. In a few clicks, you specify Kafka as the input and, say, HTTP or SSE as the output. Tyk Streams takes care of authenticating, subscribing and routing messages. This approach slashes development cycles down to hours or even minutes.
Built-in message mediation
Have messages in Avro but need JSON for your microservices? No problem. Tyk Streams can handle format transformations on the fly. You can also filter, enrich or reformat events based on business logic, all configured through Tyk’s platform rather than hard-coded.
Unified security and governance
Tyk Streams is part of the broader Tyk platform, so you can apply the same API policies (like rate-limiting, authentication, token management) to Kafka feeds that you apply to REST and GraphQL endpoints. Forget about juggling separate ACL systems or writing yet another custom security layer; Tyk Streams does it for you.
Seamless discoverability
If you want developers (internal or external) to consume Kafka-based data, simply add your event streams to Tyk’s developer portal, complete with documentation, self-serve API keys and subscription plans. Developers can quickly find and consume the streams they need, without raising ticket after ticket for your Ops team to deal with.
These features combine to empower you to streamline your microservices strategy, cutting out the complexity of specialized Kafka connector services for good.
Getting started with Tyk Streams
You can read our Tyk Streams quick start guide for full details of how to get started with Tyk Streams. The process involves five key steps:
- Set up Tyk: Make sure you have Tyk Gateway, Tyk Dashboard and Tyk Streams configured.
- Create a new stream: In the Tyk Dashboard, select Kafka as an input.
- Choose the output protocol: Decide if you want HTTP, WebSocket or SSE for downstream services.
- Apply policies: Enforce API keys, rate limits or token-based authentication to keep your data secure, just as you do for your REST and GraphQL APIs.
- Publish: Expose the new event stream in the Tyk developer portal for easy discovery by internal or external consumers.
Enjoy a leaner, faster microservices ecosystem
Kafka brings invaluable event streaming capabilities to modern microservice architectures, while Tyk Streams removes the integration headaches. Use it to say goodbye to the pain of custom bridging and enjoy a cohesive, declarative way of unifying event-driven data with your existing APIs. That means less code, less complexity and faster delivery, all with enterprise-grade security and governance baked in.
Tyk Streams entered the asynchronous API management space as part of Tyk 5.7. You can read the full Tyk 5.7 release notes here.
