Where is Kafka used?

Kafka is used for real-time streams of data, used to collect big data or to do real time analysis or both). Kafka is used with in-memory microservices to provide durability and it can be used to feed events to CEP (complex event streaming systems), and IOT/IFTTT style automation systems.

Regarding this, what is Kafka and why it is used?

Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that is used publish and subscribe to streams of records. Kafka is used for fault tolerant storage. Kafka is used for decoupling data streams. Kafka is used to stream data into data lakes, applications, and real-time stream analytics systems.

Secondly, what companies use Kafka? Companies that leverage Apache Kafka Kafka is used heavily in the big data space as a reliable way to ingest and move large amounts of data very quickly. According to stackshare there are 741 companies that use Kafka. Among them Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest, Coursera and of course Linkendin.

Keeping this in consideration, when should you use Kafka?

Use cases

Messaging. Kafka works well as a replacement for a more traditional message broker.
Website Activity Tracking. The original use case for Kafka was to be able to rebuild a user activity tracking pipeline as a set of real-time publish-subscribe feeds.
Metrics.
Log Aggregation.
Stream Processing.
Event Sourcing.
Commit Log.

What is Kafka in simple words?

Kafka is an open source software which provides a framework for storing, reading and analysing streaming data. Being open source means that it is essentially free to use and has a large network of users and developers who contribute towards updates, new features and offering support for new users.

36 Related Question Answers Found

Does Netflix use Kafka?

Netflix embraces Apache Kafka^® as the de-facto standard for its eventing, messaging, and stream processing needs. Kafka acts as a bridge for all point-to-point and Netflix Studio wide communications.

Why Kafka is so fast?

Kafka relies on the filesystem for the storage and caching. The problem is disks are slower than RAM. This is because the seek-time through a disk is large compared to the time required for actually reading the data. Modern operating systems allocate most of their free memory to disk-caching.

Why is Kafka so popular?

Kafka is to set up and use, and it is easy to reason how Kafka works. However, the main reason Kafka is very popular is its excellent performance. In addition, Kafka works well with systems that have data streams to process and enables those systems to aggregate, transform & load into other stores.

Is Kafka a database?

Let's explore a contentious question: is Kafka a database? In some ways, yes: it writes everything to disk, and it replicates data across several machines to ensure durability. In other ways, no: it has no data model, no indexes, no way of querying data except by subscribing to the messages in a topic.

Is Kafka a middleware?

Is Apache kafka a middleware between database and application? Modern databases are already fast so using kafka between application and databases will not give great benefit. You can use it among different dependent applications. Now applications are dependent on kafka only not among themselves.

How does Kafka work?

How does it work? Applications (producers) send messages (records) to a Kafka node (broker) and said messages are processed by other applications called consumers. Said messages get stored in a topic and consumers subscribe to the topic to receive new messages.

Is Kafka a framework?

Apache Kafka: A Framework for Handling Real-Time Data Feeds. Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform. It is incredibly fast, which is why thousands of companies like Twitter, LinkedIn, Oracle, Mozilla and Netflix use it in production environments. It is horizontally scalable and fault tolerant.

Which is better Kafka or RabbitMQ?

Kafka offers much higher performance than message brokers like RabbitMQ. It uses sequential disk I/O to boost performance, making it a suitable option for implementing queues. It can achieve high throughput (millions of messages per second) with limited resources, a necessity for big data use cases.

Can Kafka replace database?

The answer is no, there's nothing crazy about storing data in Kafka: it works well for this because it was designed to do it. Data in Kafka is persisted to disk, checksummed, and replicated for fault tolerance.

Does AWS support Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source, distributed streaming platform that enables you to build real-time streaming applications. AWS offers Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, a Kafka alternative that is fully managed.

How do you implement Kafka?

Quickstart

Step 1: Download the code. Download the 2.4.
Step 2: Start the server.
Step 3: Create a topic.
Step 4: Send some messages.
Step 5: Start a consumer.
Step 6: Setting up a multi-broker cluster.
Step 7: Use Kafka Connect to import/export data.
Step 8: Use Kafka Streams to process data.

Is Kafka asynchronous?

By default, topics in Kafka are retention based: messages are retained for some configurable amount of time. It's worth noting that this is an asynchronous process, so a compacted topic may contain some superseded messages, which are waiting to be compacted away. Compacted topics let us make a couple of optimisations.

Does twitter use Kafka?

As mentioned above, Kafka has been widely adopted. Furthermore, many of the features that our customers at Twitter have wanted in EventBus have already been built out in Kafka, such as a streaming library, at-least-once HDFS pipeline, and exactly-once processing.

Is Kafka free?

Kafka itself is completely free and open source. Confluent is the for profit company by the creators of Kafka. The Confluent Platform is Kafka plus various extras such as the schema registry and database connectors.

Is Kafka reliable?

Kafka's high reliability is guaranteed by its robust replication strategy. We have reached the point where we can start exploring the Kafka concept of macro level by explaining Kafka's replication principle and synchronization method.

How does uber use Kafka?

Uber's data pipeline mirrors data across multiple data centers. It uses a high-level Kafka consumer to fetch the data from the source cluster, and then it feeds that data into a Kafka producer to dump it into the destination cluster.

Is Kafka a message queue?

Kafka is a piece of technology originally developed by the folks at Linkedin. In a nutshell, it's sort of like a message queueing system with a few twists that enable it to support pub/sub, scaling out over many servers, and replaying of messages.