What is Kafka?
Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform. This is used to build real-time data pipelines and real-time data streaming applications. Let us understand this through an example. Think about what YouTube does. YouTube is a content streaming platform. Here the creators create content and any person who wants to see the content, has to subscribe to that YouTube channel. Kafka similarly runs like YouTube.
Kafka has four main key components topics, brokers , producers and consumers . Topics process the real time data . Brokers are responsible for storing and managing the stream of records . Kafka follows a publish-subscribe model . Here the producers produces the messages to the topic and consumers consume the messages from these topics in real time . It also provides some important features like data replication , scalability and fault tolerance which makes it efficient and reliable data streaming . Kafka has various use cases , such as it can be used as messaging system , gather metrics of different locations , track activities , collect application logs and many more . Overall Kafka is a fundamental toolkit used in organizations to leverage data for insights and decision making.
How To Connect To Kafka Running In Docker ?
Docker and Kafka are two important tools used in today’s digital world. Docker makes an easy deployment process by encapsulating applications into containers while Kafka provides a distributed event-streaming platform for building real-time data pipelines and data streaming applications. Here in this guide, I will first discuss what is Docker. Then I will discuss Kafka and its components. Finally, I will walk you through the various steps to run Kafka using a Docker container and also perform real-time data streaming using some Golang codes.