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Real-Time, Real Fast: Kafka & Spark for Data Engineers Specialization

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Coursera

Real-Time, Real Fast: Kafka & Spark for Data Engineers Specialization

Real-Time Kafka & Spark Data Engineering. Build fault-tolerant streaming pipelines processing millions of events with Kafka & Spark.

Caio Avelino
Jairo Sanchez

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Get in-depth knowledge of a subject
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

4 weeks to complete
at 10 hours a week
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace
Get in-depth knowledge of a subject
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

4 weeks to complete
at 10 hours a week
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace

What you'll learn

  • Design and optimize Kafka clusters for high throughput, low latency, and fault tolerance in production environments

  • Build end-to-end streaming pipelines with Spark Structured Streaming, exactly-once semantics, and schema evolution

  • Implement real-time dashboards, orchestration, and disaster recovery for enterprise streaming architectures

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Taught in English
Recently updated!

January 2026

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Specialization - 4 course series

What you'll learn

  • Configure Kafka topics with appropriate replication factors, partition counts, and durability settings to ensure high availability.

  • Diagnose performance bottlenecks using consumer lag metrics, broker health indicators, and throughput analysis.

  • Optimize producer and consumer configurations including batching, compression, and parallelism to maximize throughput while meeting latency SLAs.

Skills you'll gain

Category: Scalability
Category: System Configuration
Category: Apache Kafka
Category: Command-Line Interface
Category: Real Time Data
Category: Grafana
Category: System Monitoring
Category: Performance Tuning
Category: Content Strategy
Category: Process Optimization
Category: Data Loss Prevention
Category: Distributed Computing
Category: Prometheus (Software)

What you'll learn

  • Explain the execution model of Spark Structured Streaming and build a simple pipeline from a file source to a console sink.

  • Develop streaming pipelines that integrate with Kafka, apply event-time processing with watermarks, and write reliable outputs to Delta Lake.

  • Build an end-to-end Spark streaming pipeline that can be deployed in real-world production environments.

Skills you'll gain

Category: Data Integrity
Category: Event Management
Category: Data Pipelines
Category: Data Transformation
Category: Apache Spark
Category: Data Processing
Category: PySpark
Category: Apache Kafka
Category: Scalability
Category: Data-Driven Decision-Making
Category: JSON
Category: Real Time Data
Category: Event Monitoring

What you'll learn

  • Explain Spark’s streaming model and produce a dashboard-ready table from a simple file source.

  • Construct a real-time pipeline that ingests from Kafka, processes with Spark, and stores result in Delta using event-time windows and watermarks.

  • Operate a production-oriented dashboard with refresh policies, monitoring, and failure recovery.

Skills you'll gain

Category: JSON
Category: Dashboard
Category: Data Pipelines
Category: Real Time Data
Category: Business Metrics
Category: Apache Spark
Category: PySpark
Category: Data Persistence
Category: Business Intelligence
Category: Data Integrity
Category: Continuous Monitoring
Category: Apache Kafka
Category: Scalability

What you'll learn

  • Explain CDC fundamentals (binlog/WAL) and schema evolution strategies.

  • Configure a Schema Registry pipeline locally using Debezium and Kafka.

  • Use streaming SQL (Flink/ksqlDB) to map, cast, and merge divergent schemas into a canonical model.

Skills you'll gain

Category: Data Capture
Category: Continuous Integration
Category: Database Design
Category: Real Time Data
Category: Apache Kafka
Category: SQL
Category: Data Modeling
Category: Data Storage Technologies
Category: Continuous Monitoring
Category: PostgreSQL
Category: Data Transformation
Category: Query Languages
Category: Data Integrity
Category: Schematic Diagrams
Category: Data Validation
Category: Data Pipelines
Category: Data Mapping
Category: Software Versioning

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