This paper presented a sample currency exchange platform to illustrate the design and architecture of event-driven microservices using Apache Kafka and Confluent.

Apache Kafka and Confluent enable and extend all the microservice core principles. The primary functions of these technologies are well suited for microservices, including decoupling, separation of concerns, agility, and real-time streaming of event data. Developers and operators can use their preferred tools to deploy microservices since Apache Kafka imposes no precomposed opinion in the code, build and deployment toolchain. Data can be moved within your organization as highly scalable distributed materialized views. Additionally, since topics can be easily exposed without impacting how producing microservices behave, organizations can offer data associated with microservices as a Service. Because the platform is resilient and fault tolerant, no batches need to be relaunched as events are simply processed (or reprocessed) in the event of a failure. High and abnormal traffic will be managed with back pressure powered by Kafka. Consumers will continue processing events as fast as they can without being overflowed by requests. These event driven capabilities, when put to use in the service of a microservices architecture, allow businesses to be more productive and application development to be more agile by removing dependencies and impedences between disparate groups in an organization who work with the same data.