What happens when you have your business analyst learn about Kafka? What information do they need to know to be effective? As we ask our data teams to know about version control, testing, and documentation: why not toss streaming and Kafka into the mix? In this session, I will cover my personal journey of how I went from 8000 lines of Excel to learning about Kafka and incorporating it into my analytics pipelines. I’ll explore what topics (pun-intended) an analyst should know about Kafka to build an end-to-end analytics pipeline and what it means for the data team. Because, what? Like it’s hard? :)

1. Upleveling Analytics with Kafka
Amy Chen

2. 2
Upleveling Analytics with Kafka
Amy Chen, Kafka Summit 2023

3. Amy Chen
dbt Labs
they/them
@notamyfromdbt
amy@dbtlabs.com
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“Always a data practitioner,
never a stakeholder”

4. The framework
of the
conversation
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5. Yes, it is that hard.

6. Who is Apache Kafka For?
● To my audience:
○ What is your experience level?
○ How long did it take for you to get to this level?
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7. Folks with `Analyst` in their
Linkedin Profile
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22,100,000

8. Evidence - Merit
● Analytics Engineers own :
○ the data contacts that
dictates how a Kafka
message relates to a dbt
model
○ Debugging upstream dbt
issues and upstream
○ Updating Kafka topics as
needed
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9. Hypothesis: Apache Kafka is for Analysts
Why do you want an analyst to upskill?
● Career progression
● Upleveling the data team/more
hands on deck

10. My first data stack (without even knowing it)
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*Joke/Diagram courtesy of Xebia Data

11. My first data stack (without even knowing it)
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12. The next data stack
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13. So why am I telling you my
life story?
● Because it doesnʼt start with Apache Kafka.
● Skills ahead of time:
○ Command Line
○ AWS architecture: IAM Roles, VPNs, EC2
○ Data Warehousing and modeling
○ Resource Monitoring
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14. Experimentation & Testing the Hypothesis

15. How to learn Kafka
What didnʼt work
● Kafka: The Definitive
Guide: Real-Time Data
and Stream Processing at
Scale book
● Community slacks
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What worked
● Friends (the text
messages were weird)
● Confluent & Snowflakeʼs
developer workshops
● Stack Overflow
● Medium posts

16. Analytics Engineering & Kafka : The experiment metrics
● Build a working streaming pipeline
● Apply analytics engineer best practices to make it production ready
○ Testing
○ Documentation
○ Version Control
○ Scalability
● Variable
○ Managed Kafka Service: AWS MSK and Confluent Cloud
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17. My first end to end streaming pipeline
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18. Tools:
● Cloudformation script to set up AWS Managed Service Kafka architecture
● Snowflake Kafka Connector
Actions:
● Cloudformation to set up the Infrastructure including EC2 instance, Kafka
Cluster, Linux jumphost, and IAM roles
● Installed Kafka Connector for Snowpipe Streaming
● Set up producer and topic in MSK Cluster to ingest from Rest API
Loading the Data: AWS MSK
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19. Insert in Kafka Picture
Look, data! ✨

20. Tools:
● Confluent Cloud
● Snowflake Snowpipe
Actions:
● Creating the topic
● Created the Snowflake Sink as a connector in UI
● Provided Credentials
● Data in Snowflake
Loading the Data: Confluent Cloud
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21. ● Tested: ✅ ❌
○ Used a console consumer for adhoc
check
○ Up next: Schema Registry, no unit
testing
● Documented: ✅
○ in dbt project
● Version Controlled: ❌
○ Terraform Overkill for pet projects
● Scalability: ✅
○ AWS MSK - easy to switch out
Loading the Data: the Metrics
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22. Lessons Learned:
● No version control logic - how do I save configurations?
● Security Access is a large determinant of success
● AWS MSK - know your bash commands well to debug
● Confluent - UI error vs third party errors
● Personal issue: cross-regional dependencies
● Overall - know the bigger picture of the connections
Loading the Data
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23. Tools:
● dbt Cloud
● Snowflake
Actions:
● Using dbt to version control my logic in dbt models, created dynamic tables
inside of Snowflake
● Applied tests and documentation to my dbt models
Transforming the data
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25. ● ✅ Tested:
○ dbt tests
● ✅ Documented:
○ in dbt project
● ✅ Version Controlled:
○ dbt Github repository
● ✅ Scalability:
○ performance levers in
place
Transforming the Data: the Metrics
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26. Tools:
● Hex
Actions:
● Created a notebook that selected
from the dynamic table
Visualizing the Data
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27. Drawing Conclusions

28. ✅ Data from Kafka Topic to Notebook
❌✅ Testing implemented
✅ Documented entire pipeline
❌ ✅ Version Controlled
⏲ Scalability
The Metrics
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29. Conclusion: Apache Kafka is for Analysts
● More hands on deck with
business knowledge
● Career advancement
● Learn some software
development best practices

30. ● Dependency management
○ Where is your source coming from? What happens if thereʼs a change
upstream?
○ Data contracts
● How to debug upstream
○ Your report broke - how do you work backwards?
● SQL/Git/CLI
○ Have to flatten that json blob somehow
○ Version control & Speedy development
○ Debugging
● Cost/Performance Optimization
○ When do you need streaming?
What does an analyst actually need to know?
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31. ● Security
○ How much access to the infrastructure do you have?
● Data Governance
○ How do you maintain PII data?
● Cross team reliance
○ How do other teams work?
○ Data contracts
What can be blockers?
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33. Thank you!
Amy Chen
@notamyfromdbt
amy@dbtlabs.com