What are the core principles behind Kafka?

Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform capable of handling trillions of events a day. The core principles behind Kafka include:

  • Publish-Subscribe Messaging: Kafka employs a pub-sub model, allowing multiple producers to send data to topics which can then be consumed by multiple consumers independently.
  • Durability: Data in Kafka is stored on disk and can be replicated across multiple nodes, ensuring durability and fault tolerance.
  • Scalability: Kafka is designed to scale horizontally, allowing easy addition of brokers to increase capacity and throughput.
  • Performance: Kafka's architecture is optimized for high throughput and low latency, making it suitable for real-time processing.
  • Stream Processing: Kafka supports real-time processing of streams of records with frameworks like Kafka Streams and ksqlDB, allowing for complex processing and analytics.

Kafka event streaming pub-sub model durability scalability stream processing