Publishing, distributing, and consuming data streams on a single platform has never been easier than with Apache Kafka. From culling and analyzing stock prices to managing and monitoring mobile applications in real time, Kafka is a dynamic platform. It can be utilized in use cases where high performance, scalability, and reliability are central.
Here is your introduction to Apache Kafka and what’s possible when you deploy this real-time data platform.
What Is Apache Kafka?
Apache Kafka is an open-source platform that is free to download, modify, and deploy without limits. Kafka can be deployed on hardware, virtual machines, or containers. It can be managed on-premises or in the cloud. Users can also self-manage their Kafka environments or use an automated service offered by various vendors.
How It Works
Kafka uses a server cluster that spans multiple data centers or cloud regions. These servers continuously import and export data or use brokers as a storage layer. You have clients. Clients are applications and microservices that read, write, and process streams of events in parallel, at scale, and fault-tolerantly.
Kafka requires Java. After installing Java, download the latest Kafka version. ZooKeeper will be necessary to open and configure Kafka. After you have installed and started ZooKeeper, you can run Kafka and experiment with this advanced platform.
Ways to Use Apache Kafka Infrastructure
Real-time streaming can send data from server processes to web or mobile client applications. This allows for immediate updates and interactions between the server and users.
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SOA or microservice integration is useful for combining services that need to exchange data or actions to complete a business task. This approach improves the efficiency and reliability of business processes. Systems or organizations can send and receive data through data exchange. This ensures smooth communication and data flow between different entities.
Data can move from its source to a destination repository like a data lake or warehouse. This process helps organize and store large volumes of information efficiently. Real-time analytics involve calculating metrics that allow businesses to monitor their operations or websites instantly. This helps make timely decisions based on current data.
Most Common Uses for Kafka
Kafka can be customized to suit a range of data integration industries, such as eCommerce, financial services, IoT, and digital marketing. Many of the world’s top brands in these areas have applications and solutions built on Kafka.
Process payments on eCommerce websites and financial transactions on stock exchanges, banks, and insurance companies. Track cars, fleets, and shipments for logistics, supply chain management, and shipping.
You can also use Kafka to capture or analyze sensor data from IoT devices and equipment. Handle customer queries and orders for retail, hotels, travel, and mobile apps. Monitor hospital patients in real time to spot changes in their condition and ensure quick responses to emergencies.
Event Streaming and Apache Kafka
Event streaming is capturing data in real-time from sources—i.e., databases, sensors, mobile devices, cloud services, and software applications—and storing these events for later retrieval, manipulation, processing, and more. In essence, this is what Kafka does.
Distribute Messages in Real-Time
Kafka can easily distribute messages in real-time. It has some powerful coding to facilitate immediate and continuous message distribution from producers to consumers. Kafka delivers a premiere performance every time. It can move messages from source to destination with little to no latency. Its performance never disappoints.
Scale Kafka Up or Down
Many businesses worry about scalability. Kafka can scale up or down. It accepts thousands of connections from publishers and consumers and manages its resources efficiently. Adding or subtracting servers from a cluster allows you to adjust the scale as needed.
Rely on Kafka in Failure Scenarios and Situations
Reliability is a primary feature of Kafka, ensuring messages are never lost and always delivered. If there is a failure somewhere in your Kafka environment, it is set up to accommodate these situations and navigate through temporary disruptions.
Kafka Can Work as an Audit Tool
Use Kafka as a central point for auditing and recording data events. Kafka can be configured to retain data for set periods and operate like a database. As a log, you can then utilize this data collection to audit.
Kafka Core APIs for Java and Scala
In addition to command-line tooling for management and admin, you can use five core Kafka APIs. Admin APIs manage and inspect topics, brokers, and other objects. The Producer API publishes a stream of events to one or more topics.
Consumer API subscribes to one or more topics and processes the event stream to produce them. Stream API implements stream processing in applications and microservices. Connect API builds and runs reusable data import or export connectors that read or write from and to external systems and applications for integration.
