Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform designed for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. It is used by thousands of companies, including over 80% of the Fortune 100, across industries such as banking, insurance, telecom, and manufacturing. Kafka enables high-throughput, low-latency, fault-tolerant data processing and integration, making it ideal for mission-critical applications.

Features

• High Throughput: Delivers messages at network-limited throughput with latencies as low as 2ms.
• Scalability: Supports clusters with thousands of brokers, trillions of messages per day, and petabytes of data.
• Permanent Storage: Stores data streams in a distributed, durable, fault-tolerant cluster.
• High Availability: Efficiently stretches clusters across availability zones or geographic regions.
• Stream Processing: Built-in capabilities for joins, aggregations, filters, transformations, and exactly-once processing.
• Connect Interface: Integrates with hundreds of event sources and sinks like Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, AWS S3.
• Client Libraries: Supports multiple programming languages for reading, writing, and processing streams.

Capabilities

• Event Streaming: Real-time publishing and subscribing to streams of records.
• Data Integration: Seamlessly connects disparate systems and applications.
• Durable Storage: Retains data reliably for long periods, even if not consumed immediately.
• Fault Tolerance: Ensures system resilience and data integrity under failure conditions.
• Distributed Architecture: Operates across multiple servers and data centers.
• Operational Simplicity: Simplifies deployment and management with built-in tooling and APIs.

Benefits

• Real-Time Insights: Enables immediate reaction to data events for analytics and decision-making.
• Modern Data Infrastructure: Supports event-driven architectures and microservices.
• Cost Efficiency: Reduces overhead by consolidating data pipelines and stream processing.
• Developer Productivity: Rich documentation, tutorials, and community support accelerate development.
• Enterprise-Grade Reliability: Guarantees message ordering, zero message loss, and exactly-once semantics.