Components of Kafka:
- Broker: A Kafka broker is a server that acts as a message broker, responsible for handling the storage and retrieval of messages.
- Topic: A Kafka topic is a category or feed name to which messages are published and subscribed.
- Producer: A Kafka producer is an application or service that generates messages and publishes them to a Kafka topic.
- Consumer: A Kafka consumer is an application or service that subscribes to one or more topics and consumes messages produced by producers.
- Consumer Group: A Kafka consumer group is a set of consumers that collectively consume messages from one or more topics, with each consumer in the group processing a subset of the messages.
- Partition: A Kafka topic can be divided into multiple partitions, each of which is stored on a separate broker, enabling distributed processing of messages.
- Offset: A Kafka offset is a unique identifier assigned to each message within a partition, allowing consumers to track their progress in consuming messages from a topic.
Brief about Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that is used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. It is designed to handle high volumes of data and to provide a scalable and fault-tolerant architecture for processing data in real-time.
Kafka is built around the concept of a distributed commit log, where data is written to disk and replicated across multiple nodes in a cluster for fault-tolerance. Producers write data to Kafka topics, and consumers read data from those topics. The Kafka broker acts as a mediator between producers and consumers, handling message storage, delivery, and replication.
Kafka is often used as a key component in modern data architectures, where it can serve as a real-time data ingestion layer, a messaging system for microservices, a real-time analytics platform, or a backbone for building event-driven architectures. It has become popular in industries such as finance, telecommunications, and e-commerce, where high volumes of data must be processed in real-time.
Apache Kafka is an open-source project that is widely used in industry and is actively maintained by the Apache Software Foundation.
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