Even though only 11 years old, Node.js has emerged to be one of the most popular web development frameworks in the last decade. I’m a big Javascript fanboy, and thanks to Node.js, I can write Javascript code outside the browser to create server-side web applications that are non-blocking, lightweight, fast, robust and scalable.

As new advances in software development have allowed developers to increase their velocity and push out new software at ever increasing speeds, one less measured metric is software understandability. Although it probably seems obvious, when building new software the goal should always be to build software that is as simple and easy to understand as possible.

Working with Apache Kafka and real-time applications comes with challenges. Visibility into the deployed applications and their dependency on what we call the “data fabric” is one of them (For the sake of this blog, it means Kafka and all its state and configuration). If you’ve built a multi-tenant real-time data platform with Kafka, where teams are deploying applications outside your jurisdiction, this is where the pain is particularly acute. It goes something like this.