Introduction to Kafka for Real-Time Systems

Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform designed to handle high-throughput, real-time data pipelines. Think of it as a central nervous system for your applications, where data constantly flows between different parts of the system.

Key Concepts

1. Producers: Send messages into Kafka topics
2. Topics: Act as categories or feeds for events
3. Consumers: Subscribe to topics and process events
4. Brokers: Kafka servers that store and replicate messages

By combining these parts, Kafka ensures data can be streamed, replayed, and processed with strong durability and scalability.