Apache Kafka allows you to decouple the data streams and system. It is a bridge between your source system and target system.
It is created by LinkedIn, Now Open source project maintained by confluent. It is powerful distributed data streaming platform for large scale enterprise application.
Characteristics of Kafka
Apache Kafka is popular because of the following major characteristics
Distributed
Resilient
Fault tolerant
Horizontal scalable
High performance / Real time
Apache Kafka Use cases
Apache Kafka used for
De-coupling of system dependencies
Messaging / Activity Tracking
Log processing
Integration with Big Data technologies
Stream processing
Conclusion
That is all from Introduction, Keep in mind Apache Kafka is a enterprise level message Streaming / Publishing and consuming platform that can be used to connect multiple independent systems. Lets install Kafka on windows and we will play around with CLI commands soon.