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Daniel Tialila
Daniel Tialila

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Apache Kafka in Data Engineering for Beginners

Introduction

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform, designed for high performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration. Think of it as a high speed message hub for your data. It lets applications publish, store and subscribe to streams of records in real-time.

Key concepts in Kafka

1. Producer

An application that sends a message to Kafka topics.

2. Consumer

An application that reads message from Kafka topics.

3. Topic

A category or feed-name to which records are sent. Think of this as a channel.

4. Broker

A Kafka server. Multiple brokers form a Kafka cluster.

5. Kafka Cluster

A group of Kafka brokers working together.

Kafka use case

Imagine an e-commerce platform:

  1. Producers- Checkout service, inventory services, payment gateway.

  2. Kafka- Handles all events.

  3. Consumers- Analytics dashboard, fraud detection systems, email notifications.

Conclusion

Apache Kafka is a backbone for real-time data streaming.

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