Apache Kafka® key concepts

Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform that allows applications to produce, consume, and process records asynchronously. Key components include brokers (servers), consumers (applications reading data), consumer groups (coordination for multiple instances of an application), producers (applications writing data), topics (logical channels for organizing messages), partitions (data split across servers), replication (data preservation across multiple servers), and event-driven architecture. Apache Kafka supports both pub/sub and queueing messaging architectures, with features like message ordering, watermark tracking, and state management. It is designed to handle large volumes of data and provides high throughput, low latency, and fault tolerance.