Kafka: Introduction

This lesson gives a brief introduction to Kafka, and looks at its common use cases.

What is Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source messaging system built on the publish-subscribe model. (Kafka can also work as a plain message queue, more on that later.) By design it is distributed, durable, fault-tolerant, and highly scalable.

At its core, Kafka takes a stream of messages from producers, the applications that send them. It stores those messages reliably on a central cluster of servers, called brokers