Confluent Kafka is a platform built around Apache Kafka, an open-source event streaming platform. Kafka is designed for handling real-time data streams, making it particularly useful for scenarios where data needs to be ingested, processed, and delivered in a highly scalable and fault-tolerant manner. Confluent, on the other hand, provides additional tools and services to enhance the Kafka ecosystem and make it easier to use for various use cases.
Here are some key components and concepts related to Confluent Kafka:
- Apache Kafka: Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that can handle high volumes of data streams. It is known for its publish-subscribe architecture, where producers publish data to topics, and consumers subscribe to those topics to receive and process the data in real-time.
- Confluent Platform: Confluent Platform is a distribution of Kafka that includes additional tools and services to make Kafka easier to manage and integrate into various applications. It includes features like Confluent Control Center for monitoring and management, Confluent Schema Registry for managing data schemas, and Kafka Connect for integrating with external data sources and sinks.
- Confluent Cloud: Confluent Cloud is a managed cloud service provided by Confluent that offers Kafka as a fully managed service. It allows users to deploy Kafka clusters in the cloud without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure.
- Confluent Schema Registry: The Schema Registry is a service that provides a centralized repository for managing data schemas used in Kafka messages. This helps ensure compatibility and consistency when working with evolving data structures.
- Kafka Connect: Kafka Connect is a framework for connecting Kafka with external systems, such as databases, data warehouses, and other data sources or sinks. It provides a way to ingest data into Kafka or export data from Kafka to other systems.
- KSQLDB: KSQLDB is a streaming SQL engine for Kafka. It allows you to write SQL-like queries to process and analyze streaming data in real-time.
- Confluent Control Center: Control Center is a graphical user interface for managing and monitoring Kafka clusters. It provides insights into cluster performance, topic health, and consumer lag.
- Confluent Hub: Confluent Hub is a repository for various connectors, plugins, and extensions that can be used with Kafka and Confluent Platform.
Confluent Kafka provides a comprehensive set of tools and services that simplify the process of building, deploying, and managing real-time streaming applications. It’s widely used in various industries, including finance, e-commerce, social media, and more, for use cases such as real-time analytics, log processing, data integration, and event-driven architectures.
Event Streaming
Central nervous system works in human body and on digital platform event streaming can be thought of similar in terms of functions. Any digital platform needs to be ‘ALWAYS ON’ using event streaming for automation.
Capturing the data in real-time from event sources like DBs, sensors in IoT, mobile devices, cloud services and software platforms in the form of streams of events.
For the event streaming end-to-end with a single battle-tested solution:
- To publish (write) and subscribe to (read) streams of events including continuous import/export of data from other systems.
- To store streams of events durably and reliably for as long as we want.
- To process streams of events as they occurs or retrospectively.