Building a Microservices Architecture with Apache Kafka at Nationwide Building Society ft. Rob Jackson

Nationwide Building Society, a financial institution in the United Kingdom with 137 years of history and over 18,000 employees, relies on Apache Kafka® for their event streaming needs. But how did this come to be? In this episode, Tim Berglund talks with Rob Jackson (Principal Architect, Nationwide) about their Kafka adoption journey as they celebrate two years in production. Nationwide chose to adopt Kafka as a central part of their information architecture in order to integrate microservices. You can't have them share a database that's design-time coupling, and maybe you tried having them call each other synchronously. There's a little bit too much runtime coupling, leading to the rise of event-driven reactive microservices as a stable and extensible architecture for the next generation.Nationwide also chose to use Kafka for the following reasons:To replace their mortgage sales systems from traditional orchestration style to event-driven designs and choreography-based solutions using microservices in KafkaA cost-effective way to scale their mainframe systems with change data capture (CDC)Rob explains to Tim that now with the adoption of Kafka across other use cases at Nationwide, he no longer needs to ask his team to query their APIs. Kafka has also enabled more choreography-based use cases and the ability to design new applications to create events (pushed into a common/enterprise event hub). Kafka has helped Nationwide eliminate any bottlenecks in the process and speed up production. Furthermore, Rob delves into why his team migrated from orchestration to choreography, explaining their differences in depth. When you start building your applications in a choreography-based way, you will find as a byproduct that interesting events are going into Kafka that you didn’t foresee leveraging but that may be useful for the analytics community. In this way, you can truly get the most out of your data. EPISODE LINKSCase Study: Event Streaming & Real-Time Data in BankingIntroducing Events and Stream Processing into Nationwide Building Society (Kafka Summit talk)Learn more about NationwideJoin the Confluent CommunityCheck out Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent CloudUse 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes. 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

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