Today's network is about agility, automation, and continuous improvement. In Kafka Up and Running for Network DevOps, we will be on a journey to learn and set up the hugely popular Apache Kafka data messaging system. Kafka is unique in its principle to treat network data as a continuous flow of information that can adapt to the ever-changing business requirements. Whether you need a system to aggregate log messages, collect metrics, or something else, Kafka can be the reliable, highly redundant system you want. We will begin by learning about the core concepts of Kafka, followed by detailed steps of setting up a Kafka system in a lab environment. For the production environment, we will take advantage of the various public cloud provider offerings. Next, we will set up our Kafka cluster in Amazon Managed Kafka Service to host our Kafka cluster in the AWS cloud. We will also learn about AWS Kinesis, Azure Event Hub, and Google Cloud Put/Sub. Finally, the book will illustrate several use cases of how to integrate Kafka with our network from data enhancement, monitoring, to an event-driven architecture. The Network DevOps Series is a series of books targeted for the next generation of Network Engineers who wants to take advantage of the powerful tools and projects in modern software development and the open-source communities.