Kafka

Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform primarily used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. It's highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and operates as a publish-subscribe messaging system. Kafka was developed by LinkedIn and became an Apache open-source project in 2011.

Kafka operates as a distributed system consisting of servers and clients that communicate via a high-performance TCP-based protocol. It supports both publish-subscribe and queue-based messaging models. It is written in Scala and Java, providing a reliable and robust solution for handling large-scale data streams. The core components of Kafka include topics, producers, consumers, and brokers. Topics are categories to which records are sent; producers publish data to topics, and consumers read data from topics. Brokers manage storage and serve as the intermediaries between producers and consumers. Kafka has found applications in various domains, including logging, metrics, real-time analytics, and event sourcing, due to its high throughput and low latency.