Central is a streams-as-a-service platform that acts as a central hub for real-time data produced by various products and services. It provides a unified platform for data streaming, processing, and consumption, enabling efficient and scalable data management.

• Publish: Products publish message payloads to the Collector API with a defined schema.
• Route: The Central Collector determines the appropriate Kafka topic for the payload based on its type.
• Comsume: Consumers subscribe to specific payload types, identify the relevant topics, and consume the messages.

You can produce data to Central through two main methods:

• Collector endpoint: This involves sending data to the Collector API, which handles routing to the correct Kafka topic based on the payload type.
• Directly to Kafka: You can directly publish data to Kafka topics after necessary configurations and access permissions are granted.

To consume data from Central, you need to:

• Establish a VPC peering connection with Central Kafka VPC.
• Associate your VPC with Central's Route53 hosted zone.
• Create SASL credentials and obtain necessary permissions.
• Configure your Kafka consumer client using provided credentials and Kafka domains.

The "noisy neighbor" problem occurs when one tenant's excessive resource usage negatively impacts the performance of other tenants sharing the same infrastructure. Central plans to implement a Fair Usage Policy to mitigate this. The policy might involve setting bandwidth limits, prioritizing traffic, or implementing throttling mechanisms.

The Central DevOps Catalog outlines the roadmap, priorities, and status of various Central initiatives. It includes items related to engineering excellence, cost savings, product features, and security enhancements.

The Central OnCall team is responsible for:

• Monitoring and responding to alerts and issues reported on Slack channels and support portals.
• Troubleshooting and resolving production incidents and customer-reported tickets.
• Ensuring the smooth operation and stability of the Central platform.

Central's roadmap includes various initiatives aimed at improving performance, scalability, and security. Some key plans include:

• Upgrading Kafka and ZooKeeper versions.
• Implementing Kafka rack awareness for cost saving.
• Introducing autoscaling for Kafka and ZooKeeper.
• Addressing the "noisy neighbor" problem with a Fair Usage Policy.
• Adding support for custom headers in Kafka.
• Exploring the implementation of Kafka Streams and connectors.
• Evaluating the use of Graviton images for cost optimization. These plans aim to enhance Central's capabilities and provide a more robust and feature-rich platform for real-time data streaming.