Day 5: Engagement Consumer Development
Building StreamSocial's Real-Time Engagement Processor
This Lesson Addresses
The Engagement Processing Challenge
Lost user interactions due to unreliable message processing
System crashes from unhandled message failures
Slow engagement counters that frustrate users
Manual scaling nightmares when traffic spikes
No visibility into processing performance
What We'll Build Today
Today you're building the heart of StreamSocial's engagement system - a bulletproof consumer that processes millions of likes, shares, and comments in real-time. Think Netflix's recommendation updates or Instagram's like counters - they need instant processing without losing a single interaction.
Today's Agenda:
Consumer API mastery with polling strategies
Bulletproof deserialization patterns
Production-grade error handling
Real-time engagement metrics processing
Core Concepts: The Consumer Powerhouse
Consumer API Deep Dive Kafka consumers are pull-based systems - they actively fetch messages rather than having them pushed. This design choice is brilliant for high-scale systems because consumers control their processing rate, preventing overwhelming downstream systems.