Capabilities

Apache Kafka is an open-source streaming data platform originally developed by LinkedIn. As it expanded Kafka’s capabilities, LinkedIn donated it to Apache for further development. Kafka operates like a traditional pub-sub message queue, such as RabbitMQ, in that it enables you to publish and subscribe to streams of messages. But it differs from traditional message queues in 3 key ways: 1.) Kafka operates as a modern distributed system that runs as a cluster and can scale to handle any number of applications. 2.) Kafka is designed to serve as a storage system and can store data as long as necessary; most message queues remove messages immediately after the consumer confirms receipt. 3.) Kafka handles stream processing, computing derived streams and datasets dynamically, rather than just passing batches of messages.