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Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. Developed by the Apache Software Foundation, Kafka was initially developed at LinkedIn and became a part of the Apache project in 2011. Kafka is designed to handle real-time data feeds with low latency and high efficiency. It is beneficial for tracking service calls (like clicks or page views on a website) or tracking IoT sensor data.

  • Kafka can be spread across multiple servers for a higher degree of fault tolerance. The distributed nature of Kafka makes it incredibly scalable — you can increase the capacity of your applications by simply adding more servers to them.
  • Kafka works in real time, with the messages available to subscribers immediately after being published.
  • Messages in Kafka are redundant and replicated across multiple nodes, making the system resilient to node failures.
  • Kafka persists messages on the disk, which provides intra-cluster replication. Hence messages continue on disk as fast as possible, preventing data loss.
  • Kafka supports the processing of high volumes of messages to keep real-time data feeds.