Operations wants AVL locations, fare taps, and 311 requests kept as separate streams on the event bus. How should those streams be organized?

AVL locations, fare taps, and 311 requests should be organized as separate Kafka topics—categories on the event bus that keep streams separable for retention, access control, and consumer scaling. One unlabeled firehose with no category separation forces every consumer to filter noise and complicates security. A single consumer-only queue that rejects all publishers cannot ingest departmental events. Paper folders that cannot be read by streaming jobs fail the digital ops requirement. Exam caveat: topic-per-stream is a starting heuristic; extremely high-cardinality custom streams may need further partition design inside each topic. Operational check: create distinct topics for AVL, fare, and 311, publish fixtures to each, and confirm consumers subscribe only to the topics they need. In production terms for separate topics per civic event type, assign an owning team, wire a dashboard that shows the pattern is healthy under peak civic load, and require a staging drill that rehearses failure and recovery before resident impact. Revisit the choice when traffic shape, retention, or integrity needs change, and keep a named rollback owner on the change record. Re-test both the happy path and the failure path for separate topics per civic event type after material dependency upgrades so regressions are caught before the next public release.