Skip to main content

Kafka Self-Service Actions

Port manages a Kafka Topic per customer that publishes the execution run requests.

You can listen to a Kafka Topic with any code platform you wish to use, and also use it as a trigger for a serverless function. For example, AWS Lambda.

Port Kafka Architecture

The steps shown in the image above are as follows:

  1. Port publishes an invoked Action or Change message to Kafka;
  2. A secure Kafka topic holds all of the action invocations and changes;
about topics

The actions and changes topics are separated, their formats are:

  • Action Topic - ORG_ID.runs
  • Changes Topic - ORG_ID.change.log
about consumer groups

As part of the setup, you will need to create a consumer group that listens to the topics. The consumer group id can be one of:

  • Any group name with a prefix of your org id, for example ORG_ID.my-group-name
  • A group name that matches your username provided by Port
  1. A listener implemented on the Client side receives the new topic message and runs code defined by the DevOps team.
info

The listener can be anything that can read from a Kafka topic and run code based on the received message, for example:

  • AWS Lambda;
  • Python code that reads from the topic;
  • Docker container running code.

You control how you interact with these topics, in the way that best suits your organization and infrastructure.

An example flow would be:

  1. A developer asks to deploy a new version of an existing Microservice;
  2. The create action is sent to the runs Kafka topic;
  3. An AWS Lambda function is triggered by this new action message;
  4. The Lambda function deploys a new version of the service;
  5. When the Lambda is done, it reports back to Port about the new Microservice Deployment.

Examples​

For guides and examples of self-service actions using Kafka as the backend, check out the guides section.