chapter ten
This chapter covers
- Defining project requirements across environment setups, nonfunctional requirements, infrastructure sizing, and resource quotas
- Maintaining Kafka clusters using CLI and UI tools, GitOps, and the Kafka Admin API
- Testing Kafka applications
A successful Kafka adoption depends as much on process as on code. Teams often prototype and size infrastructure yet overlook how Kafka fits the organization’s workflow—who owns events, how changes are approved, how reliability is proven. This chapter focuses on that gap. You’ll learn how to capture requirements and data contracts, how to maintain the cluster structure across environments, and how to test applications effectively. These practices reduce risk, prevent costly rework, and make performance, cost, and compliance predictable—turning a promising prototype into an operable, supportable system. Without this structure, a promising Kafka platform could quickly spiral into an unmanageable mess.