Apache Kafka

Kafka is an event-streaming platform, initially built by LinkedIn and now part of the Apache Foundation. Used for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications Kafka’s architecture is designed to handle real-time data feeds. It works by publishing and subscribing to streams of records. Kafka is highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and provides high throughput for both publishing and subscribing.

Kafka can replace traditional message brokers like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ. It provides better throughput, built-in partitioning, replication, and fault tolerance, making it suitable for large-scale message processing applications.

Kafka was initially created to track user activity on websites. Kafka is used in recommendation systems.

Kafka is often used to collect and aggregate operational data from distributed applications, producing centralized feeds of operational data for monitoring.

I didn't understand the whole thing, but I understood that it can keep a log of data for a configurable period of time. This can then be replayed in the order of it's arrival. Consumers can either get the last data or the changed events from any period in order. There is huge shift to Event-driven Architecture and here, we should look at data as events.