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Jun Rao

Jun Rao is a distributed-systems engineer, co-creator of Apache Kafka and co-founder of Confluent, the company built around it.

Jun Rao earned a PhD in computer science from Columbia University and worked as a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center before joining the data-infrastructure team at LinkedIn. There he worked with Jay Kreps and Neha Narkhede to build Kafka around 2010 — a single pipeline for the company’s high-volume activity and operational data — open-sourced in early 2011. In 2014 he co-founded Confluent with Kreps and Narkhede.

Work

Apache Kafka. Rao was one of the three creators of Kafka and the member of the team most associated with its distributed-systems core — replication, durability, and the consistency guarantees that let an append-only log serve as reliable shared infrastructure. The Kafka subject pages carry the full treatment of the system.

Confluent and the Apache project. As a co-founder of Confluent he has remained close to Kafka’s technical direction, and has been a long-standing committer and steward of the open-source project itself.

Where his work sits

Rao’s contribution is the systems engineering beneath a durable, replicated log: the work that made Kafka dependable enough to be built on. Like his co-creators, his is a collaborative contribution — Kafka is a joint design, and its standing rests on the engineering depth that kept its guarantees sound as it spread.

Key works

See also: Apache Kafka · Jay Kreps · Apache Avro