For those who are interested in detail on how we've got Kafka set up at LinkedIn, I have just published a new posted to our Engineering blog titled "Running Kafka at Scale"
https://engineering.linkedin.com/kafka/running-kafka-scale It's a general overview of our current Kafka install, tiered architecture, audit, and the libraries we use for producers and consumers. You'll also be seeing more posts from the SRE team here in the coming weeks on deeper looks into both Kafka and Samza. Additionally, I'll be giving a talk at ApacheCon next month on running tiered Kafka architectures. If you're in Austin for that, please come by and check it out. -Todd