🚀 Introducing FlowODM: A Lightweight ODM for Apache Kafka

I’ve been building Kafka-based microservices for years, and I kept hitting the same friction points:

• Too much boilerplate for simple producer/consumer patterns
• Manual Avro schema management was tedious and error-prone
• Switching between sync and async meant different APIs
• Schema Registry integration required custom code every time
• Setting up consumer loops with error handling took time on every project

So I built FlowODM - a lightweight ODM that lets you define Kafka messages as Pydantic models:

✅ Define messages as Pydantic v2 models with full validation ✅ Auto-generate and validate Avro schemas ✅ Both sync and async operations with the same model ✅ Full Schema Registry integration built-in ✅ Production-ready consumer loop patterns ✅ Predefined settings for different workloads (real-time, batch, ML inference, etc.) ✅ CLI tools for schema validation and management

Perfect for:

• Event-driven microservices
• Data pipelines and ETL
• ML inference services
• Change data capture (CDC)
• Any Kafka-based application where you want type safety and less boilerplate

Think of it as Pydantic for Kafka - you define your message models, and FlowODM handles serialization, schemas, and the Kafka plumbing.

Quick example:

from flowodm import FlowBaseModel, ConsumerLoop

class OrderEvent(FlowBaseModel):
    class Settings:
        topic = "orders"
        consumer_group = "order-processor"

    order_id: str
    total: float

def process_order(order: OrderEvent):
    print(f"Processing ${order.total}")

ConsumerLoop(
    model=OrderEvent,
    handler=process_order,
).run()  # Handles everything: retries, shutdown, commits

Not trying to replace Kafka Streams or Flink - this is for when you want a simple, type-safe way to work with Kafka messages in Python without the ceremony.

📦 Available now: pip install flowodm 🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/Aprova-GmbH/flowodm 📖 Full blog post: https://vykhand.github.io/FlowODM-Lightweight-Kafka-ODM/

#Python #Kafka #ApacheKafka #Microservices #EventDrivenArchitecture #OpenSource #BackendDevelopment #DataEngineering