Kubernetes Platform Built in 6 Days Leads to New Drupal Kafka Module

After being turned down for a role at Confluent due to limited hands-on exposure, engineer Carlos Ospina (camoa) set himself a six-day challenge. In about 17 hours of focused work, he stood up an enterprise-style Kubernetes platform and then released an open-source module that connects Drupal to Apache Kafka.

Ospina documents the process in “From Job Rejection to Enterprise Kubernetes Platform in 6 Days.” Using a “black box” learning approach, he moved from a basic cluster to production-style patterns: role-based access control (RBAC), Kustomize overlays for dev/prod, external networking via MetalLB, persistent storage with NFS, and observability with Prometheus and Grafana. The complete learning platform code is on GitHub: camoa/kubernetes-drupal-learning.

While preparing user-event streaming from a Drupal 11 app running on the cluster, he found no direct bridge between Drupal’s Event-Condition-Action (ECA) system and Kafka. He built and published ECA Kafka Integration, enabling Drupal to act as a Kafka producer and automatically publish messages to Kafka topics based on ECA flows.

The project showcases pragmatic upskilling: deliver working infrastructure with professional guardrails first, then contribute missing components back to the ecosystem. Both the Kubernetes platform and the Drupal module are publicly available for reuse and review.