airbnb/poseidon

Poseidon is a Ruby library that lets applications send and receive messages through Apache Kafka, a popular system for moving large amounts of data between different parts of a software platform. Think of it as a post office: your app can drop off messages and other applications can pick them up later, all flowing through Kafka as the central hub. The tool works in two main directions. As a producer, your Ruby application connects to a Kafka server and sends batches of messages tagged with topics, like routing envelopes to different departments. As a consumer, your app connects and continuously fetches new messages as they arrive, processing each one in turn. The README includes code samples showing both patterns, and the setup is straightforward enough that a developer could get a basic pipeline running quickly. A developer building data-intensive applications in Ruby would reach for this when they need different services to communicate without waiting on each other. For example, a web app might log every user action by sending a message through this tool, and a separate analytics service would pick up those events later to build reports. An e-commerce platform could use it to send order details to a fulfillment system without making the customer wait for that handoff to complete. The project explicitly labels itself as alpha software and not production-ready, meaning organizations relying on it for critical workloads should proceed with caution. It requires Ruby 1.9.3 or higher and Kafka version 0.8 or above. There is optional support for Snappy compression, which reduces the size of messages traveling through the pipeline, useful when volume is high.