Uforwarder: Uber’s Scalable Kafka Consumer Proxy for Efficient Event-Driven Microservices (opens in new tab)

Uber has open-sourced uForwarder, a push-based Kafka consumer proxy built to handle trillions of messages and multiple petabytes of data daily. The system introduces context-aware routing, head-of-line blocking mitigation, adaptive auto-rebalancing, and partition-level delay processing to improve scalability, workload isolation, and hardware efficiency in large-scale event-driven microservices.