Case Study: MarineTraffic achieves 50% productivity boost and faster Kafka streaming with Lenses

MarineTraffic maps shipping fleet data with Apache Kafka

MarineTraffic, a provider of live vessel intelligence and fleet mapping, needed to move from batch processing to real-time streaming as it rebuilt a monolithic .NET/PHP/Node.js stack into cloud-native microservices and adopted Apache Kafka (with Aiven for Kafka-as-a-service). To make Kafka accessible across analytics and product teams without large development overhead, MarineTraffic turned to Lenses (using the Lenses.io portal) to enable easy, fast querying and management of real-time data on Kafka.

Lenses delivered a portal that exposes Kafka with familiar SQL queries, ready-made connectors, ACLs, topic/quota management, alerts and RBAC, speeding onboarding and operational visibility. As a result, MarineTraffic says they increased productivity by 50%, have 10–12 developers logging into Lenses.io daily, and reached outcomes “3x faster” than building their own tools—improving ETLs, monitoring, scaling and the ability to generate real-time notifications.

MarineTraffic

Christos Mantzouranis

Backend Team Leader