Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that is used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. It is horizontally scalable, fault-tolerant, fast, and runs in production in thousands of companies. Kafka is often used for operational monitoring data, such as aggregating statistics from distributed applications to produce centralized feeds of operational data. It is also used for messaging, website activity tracking, metrics collection and monitoring, logging, event sourcing, commit logs, and real-time analytics. Kafka is a good fit for large scale message processing applications since it is more robust, reliable, and fault-tolerant compared to traditional message queues. Kafka is used by a wide range of companies and organizations across various industries that need to build real-time data pipelines or streaming applications. Some of the common use cases for Kafka across different industries include:
- E-commerce: Kafka is often used to process real-time streams of data from customer interactions, such as purchases, browsing behavior, and product reviews.
- Financial services: Kafka is often used to process real-time streams of financial data, such as stock prices and transactions, to enable real-time analysis and decision-making.
- Operational monitoring: Kafka is often used to aggregate statistics from distributed applications to produce centralized feeds of operational data.
- Real-time analytics: Kafka is used to build real-time streaming data pipelines and applications that adapt to the data streams. It combines messaging, storage, and stream processing to allow storage and analysis of both historical and real-time data.
In summary, Kafka is a versatile tool that is used for a variety of purposes, including messaging, website activity tracking, metrics collection and monitoring, logging, event sourcing, commit logs, and real-time analytics. It is a good fit for large scale message processing applications and is used by a wide range of companies and organizations across various industries.
