acknowledgments
I never intended to write a book—it happened all of a sudden. I set out on this journey without any idea of what lay ahead. It turned out to be a much longer road than it first appeared, and I am deeply grateful to my family and colleagues who supported me throughout.
I would like to thank all the contributors to the Apache Kafka project for creating such powerful tools and making them open source. Kafka for Architects wouldn’t exist without your work.
Many thanks to the participants of my training sessions. You often stopped me from explaining what could be easily found in the documentation and instead asked how things really work. Your questions shaped this book—it is, in many ways, a collection of answers to your curiosity. You all deserve co-author credit.
I am deeply grateful to my family for their patience and love during this journey. I especially thank Stanislav for his continuous encouragement, Anna for helping me with the graphics, and my dog Artie for calmly waiting until I finished writing before taking him for a walk.
I am also thankful to my dear friends and colleagues for our endless discussions. I especially want to thank Peter Vašek, my earliest reviewer, for tirelessly reading and commenting on the manuscript again and again (and again). My special thanks go to Daniel Buchta, whose help in transforming my documentation-style drafts into readable content made this book accessible to a much wider audience.