Designing a Cluster Rollout Management System for Apache Kafka ft. Twesha Modi

As one of the top coders of her Java coding class in high school, Twesha Modi is continuing to follow her passion for computer science as a senior at Cornell University, where she has proven to be one of the top programmers. During Twesha's summer internship at Confluent, she contributed to designing a new service to automate Apache Kafka® cluster rollout management—a process that releases the latest Kafka versions to customer’s clusters in Confluent Cloud.

During Twesha’s internship, she was part of the Platform team, which designed a cluster management rollout service—capable of automating cluster rollout and generating rollout plans that streamline Kafka operations in the cloud. The pre-existing manual process worked well in scenarios involving just a couple hundred clusters, but with growth and the need to upgrade a significantly larger cluster fleet to target versions in the cloud, the process needed to be automated in order to accelerate feature releases while ensuring security. Under the mentorship of Pablo Berton (Staff Software Engineer I, Product Infrastructure, Confluent), Nikhil Bhatia (Principal Engineer I, Product Infrastructure, Confluent), and Vaibhav Desai (Staff Software Engineer I, Confluent), Twesha supported the design of the rollouts management process from scratch. 

Twesha’s 12-week internship helped her learn more about software architecture and the design process that goes into software as a service and beyond. Not only did she acquire new skills and knowledge, but she also met mentors who are willing to teach, share their experiences, and help her succeed along the way. 

Tim and Twesha also talk about the importance of asking questions during internships for the best learning experience, in addition to discussing the Vert.x, Java, Spring, and Kubernetes APIs.