Apache Kafka is an open source platform for distributed streaming of data. It is a software system that is used for building real-time applications and streaming data between multiple services. It was originally developed by LinkedIn in 2011 as a way to provide asynchronous communication between components of their internal systems. Over the years, it has become a popular tool for building distributed applications due to its scalability and reliability.
Apache Kafka offers several advantages over other traditional messaging systems. It provides low-latency, high throughput performance for both publishers and consumers of messages. It also provides fault tolerance through its replicated clusters, which helps ensure that messages are not lost if one node in the cluster fails. Furthermore, it supports both batching and stream processing of data which makes it suitable for a variety of use cases such as analytics applications or event-driven architectures.
Kafka works with a publish/subscribe model where producers can publish messages onto topics and consumers can consume those topics in real-time or process them later. Its partitioning structure allows for scalability by allowing producers to publish messages to multiple topics at the same time while still allowing consumers to process those messages in parallel. Additionally, Kafka provides built-in support for replication of messages across multiple clusters so that no single node becomes a bottleneck when processing large amounts of incoming traffic.
Kafka also provides an API layer which helps developers write applications that interact with the underlying broker service without having to write code specific to the broker itself. This makes it easy to add new features or modify existing ones without having to rewrite existing code or perform manual integration tests each time changes are made. Furthermore, Kafka's APIs are written in Java which makes them easy to port across different languages and platforms, making it more accessible for developers who may not be familiar with Java itself.
In conclusion, Apache Kafka is an excellent platform for distributed streaming of data due to its scalability, reliability, low latency performance and wide range of APIs available. For businesses looking for an efficient way of processing large amounts of incoming traffic while still ensuring reliability and availability of their services, Apache Kafka may be an ideal solution.
Existing applications have been supplemented and updated and are now connected to a Kubernetes environment on Azure via Apache Kafka.