Pub/Sub messaging system.
- messages or events are organized into topics (of interest for consumers)
- producers publish (write) stream of events
- consumers subscribe to (read) stream of events
- Kafka runs in a cluster -> nodes are called brokers
Message (or event or log or record) is uniquely identified by:
- topic
- partition (like a log, can be kept for some time)
- offset (like a log line)
Kafka is typically used with microservices software architecture (as opposed to monotilith). See quickstart video for more.
More: https://kafka.apache.org