Introduction

Kafka is distributed streaming platform that stores data in logs, time-series based and append only format.

Kafka messages are written into topics (messages written into a topic are stores in logs structure). Then there can be multiple subscribers that read the data.

Very good explanation of what Kafka is doing and how Kafka works.

Kafka is especially good for:

• messaging, for example as replacement for RabbitMQ

• website activity tracking

• metrics

• log aggregation

• stream processing

• event sourcing - where app states are stored as events and we can reconstruct past states using those