2025-11-04

CDC slot hygiene checklist for analytics handoffs

Mira Okonkwo · CDC · Kafka

Replication slots should never linger without an owner on-call. We assign a rotating “slot steward” who validates confirmed_flush_lsn progress against consumer lag each Monday.

The CDC Pipelines Primer dedicates a full afternoon to failing over consumers while keeping publishers unaware. Students rehearse pausing consumers, advancing slots, and rolling back without dropping data.

We also require a written contract between OLTP and analytics naming which topics map to which staging schemas. Ambiguity there causes more incidents than raw throughput limits.