Engineering Overview

This section covers Rafka's internal engineering practices for contributors and maintainers.

Test Architecture

Rafka uses a five-tier test model: unit / functional / e2e / load / chaos. Every customer-observable behavior is covered by e2e canaries in tests/e2e/tests/<feature>.rs. Unit and functional tests live in-crate. Full spec: docs/plans/i3.e4-adr.md in the repo.

OTLP Artifact Discipline

Every feature deliverable requires non-empty OTLP span artifacts before a sprint is closed. Code gates alone are not sufficient — the operation must have actually run and emitted spans to Jaeger.

Kafka-Compliance Migration

Rafka targets full Apache Kafka base compliance in phases tied to verified code delivery. The canonical plan is kafka-compliance-migration.md in the repo.

Phase 0 (current): ApiVersions + Produce — live and Jaeger-verified.

Phase 1: Metadata, Fetch, ListOffsets, SingleWal durable storage.

Phase 2+: Consumer groups, HA replication, multi-tenancy, ACL.