Kafka

kafka.apache.org: "Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications."

In other words, Kafka is a sort of distributed log where you can store events, read them and distribute them to different services and do it in high-scale and real-time.

• Real-time e-commerce
• Banking
• Health Care
• Automotive (traffic alerts, hazard alerts, ...)
• Real-time Fraud Detection

An application that publishes data to the Kafka cluster.

• Broker: a server with kafka process running on it. Such server has local storage. In a single Kafka clusters there are usually multiple brokers.

In Kafka, Zookeeper is a centralized controller that manages metadata for producers, brokers, and consumers. Zookeeper also:

  Tracks which brokers are part of the Kafka cluster

Determines which broker is the leader of a given partition and topic

Performs leader elections

Manages cluster membership of brokers