Apache Kafka

Definitions

1. A distributed event streaming platform that handles high-throughput, fault-tolerant, real-time data feeds. Messages are organized into topics, partitioned for parallelism, and replicated for durability. Consumers track their position (offset) independently. Used for event sourcing, change data capture, log aggregation, and stream processing. LinkedIn created it; Confluent maintains the commercial version.

   In plain English: A high-speed messaging system that lets applications publish and subscribe to streams of events, with replay capability.

   Example: "Every state change publishes an event to Kafka -- downstream services consume at their own pace, and we can replay events from any point in time."

Related Terms

• Binary
• Buffer
• Chunk
• EHR
• Event
• Kafka Consumer
• Kafka Producer
• Apache Kafka