This lesson presents a brief introduction and common use cases of Kafka.

What is Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source publish-subscribe-based messaging system (Kafka can work as a message queue too, more on this later). It is distributed, durable, fault-tolerant, and highly scalable by design. Fundamentally, it is a system that takes streams of messages from applications known as producers, stores them reliably on a central cluster (containing a set of brokers), and allows those messages to be received by applications (known as consumers) that process the messages.