What is Kafka?
Originally developed by LinkedIn, Apache Kafka is essentially a distributed, fault-tolerant, and highly scalable messaging system. It allows applications to publish and subscribe to real-time data feeds, providing both high throughput for publishing and subscribing to streams of records and the ability to process these streams in real-time.
What is Kafka Streaming?
Kafka Streams is a client library for processing and analyzing data stored in Kafka. It provides a simple, yet powerful, application programming interface (API) thoroughly integrated with Kafka. Its sophistication lies in the capability to transform input Kafka topics into output Kafka topics, effectively making it a highly scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed stream processing engine.
What is Kafka vs. Zero-Copy Kafka?
While traditional Kafka is fast, the concept of ‘zero-copy‘ makes Kafka even faster. Zero-Copy Kafka bypasses the application layer altogether and sends data directly from the file system cache to the socket buffer, drastically reducing CPU usage and minimizing data copying, hence, the name ‘zero-copy’. This results in increased throughput and reduced latency, making Zero-Copy Kafka a supercharged version of regular Kafka.
Here are the top five Kafka use cases:
- Data Streaming: Think of data as a fast-flowing river. We need a way to tap into that stream, harness its power, and direct it where it needs to go. That’s exactly what Apache Kafka does! It empowers us to create real-time streaming applications, enabling them to transform or react to data swiftly as it flows between systems.
- Log Aggregation: Logs are generated in tons every second, and managing them can be a daunting task. But, no worries! Apache Kafka is here to save the day. It offers a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds, making it a go-to choice for log aggregation.
- Message Queue: In the era of microservices, an efficient message queue system is a must-have. Apache Kafka as a message queue delivers scalability, built-in fault tolerance, replication, and high durability, far surpassing traditional messaging systems.
- Web Activity Tracker: Monitoring user behavior is critical to improving the user experience. Kafka is excellent at tracking website activities such as page views, searches, and uploads in real-time and on a large scale. It’s like having a 24/7 web activity detective!
- Data Replication: Apache Kafka is the trusted lieutenant for transferring data between different systems reliably. It serves as a robust and fault-tolerant bridge, ensuring that your data is replicated and synchronized across systems.
