Apache Kafka

https://kafka.apache.org/intro

Apache Kafka® is a distributed streaming platform.

A streaming platform has three key capabilities:

• Publish and subscribe to streams of records, similar to a message queue or enterprise messaging system.
• Store streams of records in a fault-tolerant durable way.
• Process streams of records as they occur.

Publisher/Subscriber, Observer pattern, Message queues.

First a few concepts:

• Kafka is run as a cluster on one or more servers that can span multiple datacenters.
• The Kafka cluster stores streams of records in categories called topics.
• Each record consists of a key, a value, and a timestamp.

Kafka has four core APIs:

• The Producer API allows an application to publish a stream of records to one or more Kafka topics.
• The Consumer API allows an application to subscribe to one or more topics and process the stream of records produced to them.
• The Streams API allows an application to act as a stream processor, consuming an input stream from one or more topics and producing an output stream to one or more output topics, effectively transforming the input streams to output streams.
• The Connector API allows building and running reusable producers or consumers that connect Kafka topics to existing applications or data systems. For example, a connector to a relational database might capture every change to a table.

Topics in Kafka are always multi-subscriber; that is, a topic can have zero, one, or many consumers that subscribe to the data written to it.

How does Kafka's notion of streams compare to a traditional enterprise messaging system? Messaging traditionally has two models: queuing and publish-subscribe. In a queue, a pool of consumers may read from a server and each record goes to one of them; in publish-subscribe the record is broadcast to all consumers. By having a notion of parallelism—the partition—within the topics, Kafka is able to provide both ordering guarantees and load balancing over a pool of consumer processes.

https://kafka.apache.org/uses

Kafka works well as a replacement for a more traditional message broker. Kafka is comparable to traditional messaging systems such as ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ.