What is Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is a software platform which is based on a distributed streaming process. It is a publish-subscribe messaging system which let exchanging of data between applications, servers, and processors as well. Apache Kafka was originally developed by LinkedIn, and later it was donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Currently, it is maintained by Confluent under Apache Software Foundation. Apache Kafka has resolved the lethargic trouble of data communication between a sender and a receiver.

What is a messaging system

A messaging system is a simple exchange of messages between two or more persons, devices, etc. A publish-subscribe messaging system allows a sender to send/write the message and a receiver to read that message. In Apache Kafka, a sender is known as a producer who publishes messages, and a receiver is known as a consumer who consumes that message by subscribing it.

What is Streaming process

A streaming process is the processing of data in parallelly connected systems. This process allows different applications to limit the parallel execution of the data, where one record executes without waiting for the output of the previous record. Therefore, a distributed streaming platform enables the user to simplify the task of the streaming process and parallel execution. Therefore, a streaming platform in Kafka has the following key capabilities:

• As soon as the streams of records occur, it processes it.
• It works similar to an enterprise messaging system where it publishes and subscribes streams of records.
• It stores the streams of records in a fault-tolerant durable way.

To learn and understand Apache Kafka, the aspirants should know the following four core APIs :

Producer API: This API allows/permits an application to publish streams of records to one or more topics. (discussed in later section)

Consumer API: This API allows an application to subscribe one or more topics and process the stream of records produced to them.

Streams API: This API allows an application to effectively transform the input streams to the output streams. It permits an application to act as a stream processor which consumes an input stream from one or more topics, and produce an output stream to one or more output topics.

Connector API: This API executes the reusable producer and consumer APIs with the existing data systems or applications.

Why Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is a software platform that has the following reasons which best describes the need of Apache Kafka.

1. Apache Kafka is capable of handling millions of data or messages per second.
2. Apache Kafka works as a mediator between the source system and the target system. Thus, the source system (producer) data is sent to the Apache Kafka, where it decouples the data, and the target system (consumer) consumes the data from Kafka.
3. Apache Kafka is having extremely high performance, i.e., it has really low latency value less than 10ms which proves it as a well-versed software.
4. Apache Kafka has a resilient architecture which has resolved unusual complications in data sharing.
5. Organizations such as NETFLIX, UBER, Walmart, etc. and over thousands of such firms make use of Apache Kafka.
6. Apache Kafka is able to maintain the fault-tolerance. Fault-tolerance means that sometimes a consumer successfully consumes the message that was delivered by the producer. But, the consumer fails to process the message back due to backend database failure, or due to presence of a bug in the consumer code. In such a situation, the consumer is unable to consume the message again. Consequently, Apache Kafka has resolved the problem by reprocessing the data.
7. Learning Kafka is a good source of income. So, those who wish to raise their income in future in IT sector can learn.