About Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka was created by Linkedin, It was released as an open source project on GitHub in late 2010. it was proposed and accepted as an Apache Software Foundation incubator project in July of 2011.

Apache Kafka graduated from the incubator in October of 2012. Since then, it has continuously been worked on and has found a robust community of contributors and committers outside of LinkedIn.

In the fall of 2014, the original Kafka creators: Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede, and Jun Rao left LinkedIn to found Confluent, a company centered around providing development, enterprise support, and training for Apache Kafka.

The Apache Kafka site defines Kafka as a distributed streaming platform. It has three main capabilities:

• Reading and writing records like a message queue
• Storing records with fault tolerance
• Processing streams as they occur

Kafka is:

• distributed
• resilient architecture
• fault tolerant - you can upgrade it without taking all the system down
• horisontal scalable - can scale to hundreds of brokers and thousands of messages per second
• high performing - latency is less than 10ms, we can call it a real time system
• widely used - over 2k companies, 80% of the Fortune 100 companies