Event-driven applications often need to process data in real-time. When you use AWS Lambda to process records from Apache Kafka topics, you frequently encounter two typical requirements: you need to process very high volumes of records in close to real-time, and you want your consumers to have the ability to scale rapidly to handle traffic spikes. Achieving both necessitates understanding how Lambda consumes Kafka streams, where the potential bottlenecks are, and how to optimize configurations for high throughput and best performance.
In this post, we discuss how to optimize Kafka processing with Lambda for both high throughput and predictable scaling. We explore the Lambda’s Kafka Event Source Mappings (ESMs) scaling, optimization techniques available during record consumption, how to use ESM Provisioned Mode for bursty workloads, and which observability metrics you need to use for performance optimization.
To start processing records from a…