The Confluent Developer Skills for Building Apache Kafka is a great way to get started in Kafka.
This course is three days long, but these are packed three days! This course is great because it goes in depth in the Kafka solution. Before attending this course, I tried several other Kafka courses (like the one in Udemy with Stephane Maarek), but they were not as complete and I didn’t really get it.
The course is great for developers who want to learn how they can produce and consume from/to Kafka. They will learn how to do so going in depth and leveraging all the good things we love about Kafka - scalability and fault tolerance included. I personally find Kafka development a bit challenging to get right, especially if you are aiming for good performances. This training solves this by explaining all the important Kakfa concepts from a developer perspective - messages acks, idempotence, commits, batch size, topic partitioning, replication factor, everything is explained.
The course is also great for less technical people that want to understand what is Kafka and how it’s useful. I met a lot of manager and architects with no training in Kafka that did not understand Kafka’s role in the architecture, thinkings it’s just a scalable message queue. The three days demonstrates that’s not the point by giving practical experience with all the components in the Kafka ecosystem: Kafka clients (producers and consumers) of course, but also Kafka Streams, Kafka SQL, Kafka Connect, Kafka Schema Registry and Kafka Rest Proxy.
I would recommend this course for anyone who wishes to pass the Kafka Developer certification. The handbook is complete and fully annotated - there is some very important information in there and I use it regularly as reference in my day-to-day work.
