Apache Kafka is an open-source streaming system used for stream processing, real-time data pipelines, and data integration at scale. It was first launched in 2011 as part of LinkedIn to handle real-time data feeds. It has since grown into an event streaming platform that can handle millions of messages per second and trillions daily.
Apache Kafka is a highly impressive system with many advantages and use cases. At its base level, Apache Kafka is a way to capture data in real time from databases, sensors, mobile devices, cloud services, and software. Every piece of data is captured as an event and then stored in Apache Kafka to be processed or manipulated. It is also processed, responded to, and routed to other destinations.
In this system, data is continuously flowed and interpreted to be presented at the right time. Let’s explore the basics of Apache Kafka and how it can help your business.
Why Use Apache Kafka?
Over 80% of Fortune 100 companies use Kafka. Companies in every industry use it on projects large and small. It is a must-have technology for developers and architects who want to build scalable real-time data streaming applications.
Kafka’s scalability is a major reason it makes sense for many companies. It can handle a high volume of data, with millions of messages processed every second, but you need more functionality than what you have. Kafka can read trillions of messages daily, process petabytes of data, and have hundreds of thousands of partitions.
It is a low-latency permanent storage that is highly available across multiple geographical regions. There is no risk of data loss.
How Can Apache Kafka Be Used?
Apache Kafka can collect, store, and make available data produced by different divisions or departments of the same company. It also processes payments and financial transactions in real-time. In this way, Apache Kafka is used by financial institutions, insurance companies, and stock exchanges.
This system captures and analyzes sensor data from IoT devices or similar smart equipment. Factories use it every day. In addition, track cars, trucks, and fleets in real-time as they travel the world, such as the automotive industry.
Apache Kafka collects and reacts to customer interactions and processes orders for retail, hotel hospitality, and travel companies. It monitors product shipping in real-time with Apache Kafka, including shipping and supply chain management. It also manages hospital patients. Use Apache Kafka’s capabilities to predict condition changes, ensuring health emergencies receive timely care.
How Is Kafka Used?
Kafka has a storage and a compute layer. Together, they enable simplified data streaming between Kafka and external systems. Kafka can be used, adapted, or scaled to your needs in any infrastructure.
Kafka can be deployed on hardware and virtual machines or containers on-premises or in the cloud. Kafka environments can be self-managed or fully managed by a third-party vendor. How Kafka is set up and administered is entirely up to the user.
How Does Apache Kafka Work?
Kafka is a server and client system communicating through the TCP network protocol.
From the server side, Kafka resembles a cluster of one or more servers typically spread across multiple data centers or cloud regions. It then runs across these, integrating its system with your existing systems, such as relational databases. If any of its servers fail, the other servers take over, ensuring continuous operations without data loss.
From the client side, you can write distributed applications and microservices that read, write, and process streams of events. The open-source Kafka community provides dozens of clients in addition to what Kafka already comes with when shipped.
Benefits of Kafka in Business Infrastructure
Process and analyze data as soon as it is generated. Using the Kafka Streams API, you have a powerful library that aggregates, creates windowing parameters, and performs data joins within a stream. As a Java application, it can also be built on top of Kafka and requires no extra clusters to maintain.
Kafka provides durable storage. It can distribute data across multiple nodes for high-availability deployment within a single data center or in various availability zones.
Kafka is centred on a commit log. You can subscribe to it and publish data across large swaths of systems or real-time applications. This isn’t a messaging queue. Kafka scales as needed. This is done when it matches passengers with Uber drivers. It also provides analysis and predictive maintenance on IoT devices and performs real-time services across platforms like LinkedIn.
Core Kafka APIs for Java and Scala
While you have command line tooling for management and admin tasks, Kafka offers five core APIs for Java and Scala. Its Admin API inspects topics, brokers, and other Kafka objects. Also, its Producer API publishes a stream of events to one or more Kafka topics.
Its Consumer API subscribes to one or more topics and processes the event stream to produce them. Kafka Streams API implements stream processing in applications and microservices.
Kafka Connect API builds and runs reusable data import/export connectors that consume or produce streams of events from and to external systems and applications. This allows full integration with Kafka.
Also Read: What are the 5 best Apache Kafka Use Cases?
