Build a durable pub-sub with Kafka in Node.js

Kafka is an open-source platform that facilitates the creation of durable, fault-tolerant, and scalable data pipelines, which are crucial for applications dealing with significant user engagement, like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Netflix. It uses a publish-subscribe (pub-sub) model to enable asynchronous communication between producers and consumers, decoupling them and allowing for scalable event handling. Kafka's architecture includes brokers, topics, and partitions, ensuring data durability and allowing multiple consumers to access the same event. Unlike traditional HTTP requests, Kafka allows for efficient event processing without blocking operations, making it suitable for microservice-based applications. By using Kafka, developers can enhance their Node.js applications with event-driven architectures, allowing for features such as efficient notification systems, user activity tracking, and the ability to replay events to maintain data integrity. The text guides setting up Kafka in a Node.js environment, detailing the creation of producers and consumers, and customizing consumption settings to optimize performance.