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FastAPI with Kafka Consumer

This project shows how to use a Kafka Consumer inside a Python Web API built using FastAPI. This can be very useful for use cases where one is building a Web API that needs to have some state, and that the state is updated by receiving a message from a message broker (in this case Kafka).

One example of this could be a ML Web API, that is serving requests for performing inferences according to the current model. Often, this model will be updated over time as the model gets retrained according to a given schedule or after model/data drift job has been executed. Therefore, one solution could be to notify the Web API by sending a message with either the new model or some metadata that will enable the API to fetch the new model.

Technologies

The implementation was done in python>=3.7 using the web framework fastapi, and for interacting with Kafka the aiokafka library was chosen. The latter fits very well within an async framework like fastapi is.

How to Run

The first step will be to have Kafka broker and zookeeper running, by default the bootstrap server is expected to be running on localhost:9092. This can be changed using the environment variable KAFKA_BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS.

Next, the following environment variable KAFKA_TOPIC should be defined with desired for the topic used to send messages.

$ export KAFKA_TOPIC=<my_topic>

The topic can be created using the command line, or it can be automatically created by the consumer inside the Web API.

Start the Web API by running:

$ python main.py

Finally, send a message by running the producer.py:

$ python producer.py
Result 
```
Sending message with value: {'message_id': '4142', 'text': 'some text', 'state': 96}
```

The producer sends a message with a field state that is used in this demonstration for showing how the state of the Web API can be updated. One can confirm that the state of the Web API is being updated by performing a GET request on the /state endpoint.

curl http://localhost:8000/state
Result before sending message 
```
{"state":0}
```
Result after sending message 
```
{"state":23}
```    
The actual value will vary given it's a random number.

Consumer Initialization

During the initialization process of the Consumer the log end offset is checked to determine whether there are messages already in the topic. If so, the consumer will seek to this offset so that it can read the last committed message in this topic.

This is useful to guarantee that the consumer does not miss on previously published messages, either because they were published before the consumer was up, or because the Web API has been down for some time. For this use case, we consider that only the most recent state matters, and thereby, we only care about the last committed message.

Each instance of the Web API will have it's own consumer group (they share the same group name prefix + a random id), so that each instance of the API receives the same state updates.