An important underlying concept behind location-based applications is called geofencing. Geofencing is a process that allows acting on users and/or devices who enter/exit a specific geographical area, known as a geo-fence. A geo-fence can be dynamically generated—as in a radius around a point location, or a geo-fence can be a predefined set of boundaries (such as secured areas, buildings, boarders of counties, states or countries).

Geofencing lays the foundation for realizing use cases around fleet monitoring, asset tracking, phone tracking across cell sites, connected manufacturing, ride-sharing solutions and many others.

GPS tracking tells constantly and in real time where a device is located and forms the stream of events which needs to be analyzed against the much more static set of geo-fences. Many of the use cases mentioned above require low-latency actions taken place, if either a device enters or leaves a geo-fence or when it is approaching such a geo-fence. That’s where streaming data ingestion and streaming analytics and therefore the Kafka ecosystem comes into play.

This session will present how location analytics applications can be implemented using Kafka and KSQL & Kafka Streams. It highlights the exiting features available out-of-the-box and then shows how easy it is to extend it by custom defined functions (UDFs). The design of such solution so that it can scale with both an increasing amount of position events as well as geo-fences will be discussed as well.