Note from read “Everything you need to know about Kafka in 10 minutes”

Apache Kafka® is an event streaming platform. What does that mean?

• To publish (write) and subscribe to (read) streams of events
• To store streams of events durably and reliably for as long as you want.
• To process streams of events as they occur or retrospectively.

Kafka is a distributed system consisting of servers and clients that communicate via a high-performance TCP network protocol.

Servers: Kafka is run as a cluster of one or more servers that can span multiple datacenters or cloud regions.

Clients: They allow you to write distributed applications and microservices that read, write, and process streams of events …

Main Concepts and Terminology

• Event: An event records the fact that “something happened” in the world or in your business. It is also called record or message in the documentation. When you read or write data to Kafka, you do this in the form of events. Conceptually, an event has a key, value, timestamp, and optional metadata headers

• Producers: Producers are those client applications that publish (write) events to Kafka.

• Consumers: consumers are those that subscribe to (read and process) these events.

• Topics: Very simplified, a topic is similar to a folder in a filesystem, and the events are the files in that folder.

• Partitioned: Topics are partitioned, meaning a topic is spread over a number of “buckets” located on different Kafka brokers

Events with the same event key (e.g., a customer or vehicle ID) are written to the same partition,