Peak Season Kafka Resilience
Black Friday, holiday rushes, flash sales. Test failover before customers arrive. Chaos engineering validates your DR plan. Automated cluster switching keeps orders flowing when incidents hit.
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When Kafka goes down, teams scramble. Each application has its own failover procedure. Coordination takes hours while orders queue up.
The disaster recovery plan exists on paper. Nobody knows if it works because testing it risks production.
Black Friday traffic is 5-10x normal. Systems that work fine in dev break under load. Connector backlogs, consumer lag, and broker overload hit simultaneously.
During an incident:
- Platform team pages 40+ application owners
- Each team reconfigures connection strings
- Some apps need restarts, others don't
- Revenue loss measured in minutes
Reality check:
- Replicator lag unknown under load
- Offset translation never validated
- Consumer restart behavior untested
- First real test is during the outage
Scaling issues emerge too late:
- Connectors can't keep up
- Partition imbalance causes hotspots
- Consumer groups fall behind
- Discovery happens during the sale
Chaos Testing
Inject broker failures, network latency, and leader elections in pre-production. Validate application behavior before peak traffic hits
Automated Failover
Gateway-level cluster switching. One API call moves all applications to the backup cluster—no individual reconfigurations
Multi-Cluster Monitoring
Track replication lag, consumer offsets, and broker health across primary and DR clusters from one console
Latency Injection
Test how applications handle slow brokers. Simulate network degradation between regions before it happens in production
Message Corruption
Inject corrupt messages to validate dead-letter queue handling. Ensure bad data doesn't break order processing
Failover Validation
Test the full failover sequence: cluster switch, offset translation, consumer restart. Know your RTO before you need it
Chaos Interceptors
Eight chaos testing interceptors: broken brokers, latency, leader elections, slow producers, message corruption, invalid schemas, duplicate messages
Cluster Routing
Gateway handles connection routing during failover. Applications automatically connect to the backup cluster through Gateway
Real-Time Dashboards
Monitor lag, throughput, and error rates during chaos tests. See exactly when and how systems degrade
Production Safety
Chaos testing runs in Gateway—test against production-like traffic without risking production data
API-Driven Tests
Trigger chaos tests via API. Integrate with your CI/CD pipeline for continuous validation before peak season
One-Click Failover
Switch clusters through API or Console. All applications follow automatically through Gateway routing
How Peak Season Preparation Works
From untested DR plan to validated resilience in four steps.
Run chaos tests against your checkout and order pipelines. Document how applications behave under broker failures and network degradation
Execute full failover to DR cluster. Measure actual RTO. Identify applications that need manual intervention
Address issues found during testing. Update runbooks. Automate manual steps through Gateway policies
Schedule regular chaos tests. Catch regressions from deployments. Enter peak season with confidence
Order Management DR
Test checkout pipeline failover before Black Friday. Validate that orders continue flowing when the primary cluster fails
E-Commerce Checkout
Inject latency into payment event streams. Ensure checkout completes even when downstream services slow down
Inventory Sync
Test what happens when inventory update consumers fall behind. Validate catch-up behavior and alerting
Partner Integrations
Simulate carrier API failures. Ensure order routing continues when shipping partners have outages
Returns Processing
Test refund event processing under load. Validate that holiday returns don't overwhelm the system
Real-Time Analytics
Inject broker failures during reporting windows. Ensure dashboards recover gracefully
For Kafka cost allocation and compliance reporting, see platform governance. For self-service Kafka provisioning, see developer self-service.
Read more customer stories
Frequently Asked Questions
What chaos tests can Conduktor run on Kafka?
Eight interceptor types: simulate broken brokers, inject latency, trigger leader elections, slow producers/consumers, corrupt messages, inject invalid schema IDs, and duplicate messages. Tests run at the Gateway layer.
Can we test failover without impacting production?
Yes. Run chaos tests against a production-like environment through Gateway. Test traffic patterns and application behavior without risking real orders.
How does automated Kafka failover work?
Gateway routes all application traffic. When you switch clusters, all applications automatically connect to the new cluster. No individual app reconfigurations required.
What if our applications don't support automatic failover?
Gateway handles connection routing. Most applications need no changes. For stateful applications, we help you design offset translation and restart procedures.
How long does Kafka cluster failover take?
Gateway switching is near-instant. Actual RTO depends on consumer restart behavior and offset translation. Chaos testing helps you measure and optimize your specific RTO.
Validate your DR plan before peak season
See how Conduktor helps retail teams test failover, inject chaos, and enter peak season with confidence. Get a demo tailored to your architecture.