What is Apache Kafka?

  

Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that offers high-throughput, low-latency, and durability.. It is a message broker that enables communication between different applications.

Apache Kafka is used in a variety of applications, including: - Messaging - Website activity tracking - Audit trails - Log aggregation - Stream processing The fundamental construct in Kafka is a topic. Topics are like channels in a messaging system. You can publish messages to a topic, and subscribers can consume those messages. Apache Kafka is a distributed system, so topics are partitioned and replicated across multiple brokers. This allows for high availability and fault tolerance.

It provides different delivery guarantees: at least once, exactly once, and in order.

The at least once guarantee means that each message will be delivered at least once, but there may be duplicates.

The exactly once guarantee means that each message will be delivered exactly once, but the order of delivery is not guaranteed.

The in order guarantee means that each message will be delivered in the order that it was sent, but there may be duplicates.

Here are few key concepts in Kafka: - Producers are processes that publish messages to topics. - Consumers are processes that subscribe to topics and consume messages. - Messages are key-value pairs that are published to topics. - Topics are divided into partitions that are replicated across multiple brokers.

Apache Kafka offers a variety of features that make it a powerful streaming platform, including support for multiple data sources, multiple consumers, multiple topics, data compression and retention. Kafka is highly scalable and can be deployed on a cluster of servers for increased performance. It is battle-hardened and has a large and active community that provides support and resources.

Apache Kafka is a good choice for streaming data when high-throughput, low-latency, and durability are required. To learn more about Kafka, check out the documentation.