You who follows my blog and have read my weekly roundups you know that I am quite (that is an understatement) interested in Apache Kafka and I am curious to find out what “cool” things one can do with it. For that, I want to be able to test “stuff” quickly. When I test and try out new things, I usually do it on my development box which contains everything I need: SQL Server, RabbitMQ, RStudio, Microsoft Machine Learning Server, Visual Studio and the list goes on.
So seeing that I have most of my “tools of the trade” on my machine I obviously also would like to have Kafka on the box. Herein lies a problem, I am a Windows dude and Kafka, and Windows do not gel. Yes, some people are running Kafka on Windows, but it is a chore. OK, so what to do? Sure, I could potentially run Kafka on a virtual machine, or in a Docker image, but it is not as transparent as I would like it to be (yeah, I am lazy).
Hmm, Microsoft did introduce the ability to run Linux binary executables (in ELF format) natively on Windows 10 in Windows 10 version 1607. The feature is called Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and since I am now running version 1803, maybe I should try and install Kafka in WSL.