The graphical curve of ‘getting things done with Kafka’ vs. ‘time spent with Kafka’ rises pretty quickly before starting to plateau. Kafka, as we know, is great to get started out of the box. Eventually though, anyone who has used Kafka for a reasonable amount of time would come across problems, both trivial and hardcore. More often than not, these problems feel tedious and repetitive which could be addressed better by the Kafka community. Issues like skewed partitions and brokers, partition reassignment for a large number of topics, working with messed up consumer offsets, distributing workload evenly to partitions, monitor and view the Kafka cluster better, etc. sound familiar among the community. Come, learn from our experiences trying to overcome and automate some of the most common problems surrounding the scaling Kafka clusters at Tinder. Let’s create an environment of sharing the best practices for usage of tools around Kafka.