Dissolving the Problem: Kafka is more ACID Than Your Database

It has become at truism in the past decade that building systems at scale, using non-relational databases, requires giving up on the transactional guarantees afforded by the relational databases of yore, ACID transactional semantics are fine, but we all know you can’t have them all in a distributed system. Or can we?

In this talk, I will argue that by designing our systems around a distributed log like Kafka, we can in fact achieve ACID semantics at scale. We can ensure that distributed write operations can be applied atomically, consistently, in isolation between services, and of course with durability. What seems to be a counterintuitive conclusion ends up being straightforwardly achievable using existing technologies, as an elusive set of properties becomes relatively easy to achieve with the right architectural paradigm underlying the application.

About Tim Berglund

Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with Confluent, where he serves as the Vice President of Developer Relations. He is a regular speaker at conferences and a presence on YouTube explaining complex technology topics in an accessible way. He tweets as @tlberglund, blogs every few years at http://timberglund.com. He has three grown children and two grandchildren, a fact about which he is rather excited.

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