Blog — Vishnu Balachandran

Blog

Original writing on architecture, event-driven systems, reliability and engineering careers — drawn from production work on banking and high-traffic platforms, with the numbers and the trade-offs left in.

3 articles

Streaming Pipelines for Banking Billing and Payments: Kafka, NiFi and Ignite

Banking data arrives as files on somebody else's schedule and has to be processed as a stream with money-grade correctness. Why the ingest tool and the event backbone are different tools, and what a distributed cache is genuinely for.

Sep 11, 2026 By Vishnu Balachandran KafkaData EngineeringBanking & FintechDistributed SystemsSystem Design

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Real-Time Analytics with Kafka Streams, Elasticsearch and Kibana

Building analytics that answer questions about the last five minutes, not last night: windowing and the late-event problem, why the state store needs a changelog topic, and the split between what Kafka Streams should compute and what Elasticsearch should.

Sep 9, 2026 By Vishnu Balachandran KafkaData EngineeringObservabilityDistributed SystemsSystem Design

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A 10x Latency Reduction That Started With a Profiler, Not a Rewrite

The optimisation I was sure would work did nothing. What produced a 10x improvement was measuring first and discovering the cost was in how the ORM loaded data, not in the code I had been reading.

Sep 2, 2026 By Vishnu Balachandran PerformanceJava & SpringData EngineeringEngineering Practice

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