Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open‑source, distributed event‑streaming platform designed for high‑throughput, low‑latency data pipelines and real‑time processing. It acts as a central backbone that lets systems publish, store, and consume streams of records without requiring complex point‑to‑point integrations. Kafka’s architecture—based on partitioned, replicated logs—enables scalable, fault‑tolerant data movement across modern distributed systems.

Benefits of Kafka

• High throughput and low latency: Kafka can process millions of messages per second with millisecond‑level latency, making it ideal for real‑time systems.
• Scalability: Distributes data across partitions and brokers, supporting horizontal scaling to large production clusters.
• Fault tolerance: Replicates data across brokers, ensuring durability and high availability.
• Event replay and long‑term retention: Kafka stores events durably and allows consumers to re‑read data at their own pace.
• Ecosystem integration: Connectors enable integration with databases, cloud storage, analytics engines, and more.
• Decoupled architecture: Producers and consumers operate independently, simplifying distributed system design.

Typical Use Cases

• Real‑time analytics pipelines (e.g., clickstream processing, user behavior insights).
• Event‑driven microservices communication.
• Log aggregation and centralised metrics collection.
• Fraud detection and monitoring systems.
• Feeding big‑data systems such as Spark, Flink, or Hadoop.
• Integrating data sources and sinks through Kafka Connect (databases, S3, Elasticsearch, etc.)