Kafka Load Balancing at Agoda for Terabytes of Data

Agoda uses Kafka to manage hundreds of terabytes of data across various supply systems, including hotels and restaurants, ensuring real-time price updates. They faced challenges with the traditional round-robin partitioning and consumer assignment due to heterogeneous hardware and uneven workloads, resulting in over-provisioning. Agoda addressed these issues by implementing dynamic, lag-aware strategies, including a lag-aware producer and consumer, to optimize message distribution and reduce latency.