The fine folks at Datamountaineer have developed the stream-reactor making it easier to integrate data piplines with Kafka.
As a demo I'm streaming Twitter data to Kafka, and then from Kafka to RethinkDB.
Configs using Landoop's fast-data-dev environment:
Source: Twitter
name=TwitterSourceConnector
connector.class=com.eneco.trading.kafka.connect.twitter.TwitterSourceConnector