Public Transport Optimization with Apache Kafka

A streaming event pipeline using Apache Kafka and its ecosystem. Using public data sourced from the Chicago Transit Authority we've constructed an event pipeline to simulate the Chicago train transport system and display real time status updates. We have used Kafka and ecosystem tools such as REST Proxy, Kafka Connect, Faust Streams and KSQL to accomplish this task.

Our architecture looks like so:

The UI will display the status of train lines and looks like so:

Prerequisites

The following are required:

• Docker
• Python 3.7
• Access to a computer with a minimum of 16gb+ RAM and a 4-core CPU to execute the simulation

Running and Testing

To run the simulation, you must first start up the Kafka ecosystem: %> docker-compose up

Docker compose will take a 3-5 minutes to start, depending on your hardware. Please be patient and wait for the docker-compose logs to slow down or stop before beginning the simulation.

Once docker-compose is ready, the following services will be available:

Service	Host URL	Docker URL	Username	Password
Public Transit Status	http://localhost:8888	n/a
Landoop Kafka Connect UI	http://localhost:8084	http://connect-ui:8084
Landoop Kafka Topics UI	http://localhost:8085	http://topics-ui:8085
Landoop Schema Registry UI	http://localhost:8086	http://schema-registry-ui:8086
Kafka	PLAINTEXT://localhost:9092,PLAINTEXT://localhost:9093,PLAINTEXT://localhost:9094	PLAINTEXT://kafka0:9092,PLAINTEXT://kafka1:9093,PLAINTEXT://kafka2:9094
REST Proxy	http://localhost:8082	http://rest-proxy:8082/
Schema Registry	http://localhost:8081	http://schema-registry:8081/
Kafka Connect	http://localhost:8083	http://kafka-connect:8083
KSQL	http://localhost:8088	http://ksql:8088
PostgreSQL	jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/cta	jdbc:postgresql://postgres:5432/cta	cta_admin	chicago

Note that to access these services from your own machine, you will always use the Host URL column.

When configuring services that run within Docker Compose, like Kafka Connect you must use the Docker URL.

Running the Simulation

There are four pieces to the simulation: the producer service, consumer service/app, faust and KSQL stream processing apps. Open a terminal window for each of the following components and run them at the same time:

1. Producer service:

1. cd producers
2. virtualenv venv
3. . venv/bin/activate
4. pip install -r requirements.txt
5. python simulation.py

2. Faust Stream Processing Application:

1. cd consumers
2. virtualenv venv
3. . venv/bin/activate
4. pip install -r requirements.txt
5. faust -A faust_stream worker -l info

3. KSQL Creation Script:

1. cd consumers
2. virtualenv venv
3. . venv/bin/activate
4. pip install -r requirements.txt
5. python ksql.py

4. Consumer service:

1. cd consumers
2. virtualenv venv
3. . venv/bin/activate
4. pip install -r requirements.txt
5. python server.py