question related to kafka

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We will need to integrate with other system using Kafka. 
 
 I noticed that appian is using zookeeper/kafka for internal communication. Is there any way to use kafka directly from appian code/smart service , and if we added a new subscribe channel into appian's kafka, will it break anything ? 
 thanks,

Eliot Gerson · Accepted Answer

I would recommend against doing this for a couple reasons. 1) Appian may sometimes use a modified distribution of Kafka and/or Zookeeper. Accordingly, interactions with non-Appian services could result in unexpected behavior. 2) As another community member noted, kafka and zookeeper are critical components of your Appian system. Reducing isolation of these components by introducing non-Appian services or systems into your Appian architecture could increase the risk of instability in the environment.

josep · Answer

Hello Youyongz, 
 Personally I don’t recommend you to do this just because the Kafka and zookeeper are critical components for the backups and recovery (look for “Transaction Management” the transaction logs ). 
 Check these links: 
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 - high availability and disaster recovery configurations . 
 There are cases where we might need to move some configuration for example while adding high Availability installations. 
 
 Maybe it won’t break anything, but you will be using important resources to Appian and that adds variables to the “standard usage”. If you still want to know more about this i recommend you to open an Appian Case to ask them if it is supported. Based on the nature of those components to Appian I guess it is not supported. 
 I haven’t seen in the public API or something to expose those components (since are internal and critical to Appian). On another hand, I haven’t seen any component from hadoop like Kafka been included as a plugin. If you have an good use case it can be interesting to create a plugin to integrate with kafka. 
 With all this said I just want to add that one of the standard messaging solutions supported by Appian is the JMS. Would it Be enough to cover the requirement? If you still need Kafka, maybe considering the JMS—Kafka connector as an option? 
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 Why don’t you let us know your use case and maybe we can help you to evaluate your options 
 Jose

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