Cloudflow is an SDK and a set of Kubernetes extensions that allows to build streaming applications as a set of small, composable components communicating with messages over Kafka and wired together with schema-based contracts. This approach can significantly improve reuse and allows you to dramatically accelerate streaming application development. 
Connectivity of Cloudflow applications to external services is provided by inlets and outlets. Currently, Cloudflow supports HTTP and file inlets. Although HTTP is widely used for these purposes, it might not be the best option because it was not designed for machine-to-machine communication. HTTP communications are typically JSON, which are not strongly typed, they support only request/response interactions, etc. A better option for Cloudflow inlets/outlets is usage of RSocket - a message driven binary protocol, which is performant, reactive and supports multiple interaction styles.
We will start by presenting main features of Cloudflow and RSockets and then show how they can be used together.
The resulting integration supports binary streams which lead to smaller packets, greater speed, and less latency. It also significantly simplifies the usage of the schema-first approach used throughout Cloudflow implementations.