Apache Kafka

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Apache Kafka[1]
Original author(s)	LinkedIn
Developer(s)	Apache Software Foundation
Initial release	January 2011; 14 years ago (2011-01)[2]
Stable release	4.0.0[3]  / 18 March 2025
Repository	github.com/apache/kafka
Written in	Scala, Java
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Stream processing, Message broker
License	Apache License 2.0
Website	kafka.apache.org

Apache Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform. It is an open-source system developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Java and Scala. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. Kafka can connect to external systems (for data import/export) via Kafka Connect, and provides the Kafka Streams libraries for stream processing applications. Kafka uses a binary TCP-based protocol that is optimized for efficiency and relies on a "message set" abstraction that naturally groups messages together to reduce the overhead of the network roundtrip. This "leads to larger network packets, larger sequential disk operations, contiguous memory blocks [...] which allows Kafka to turn a bursty stream of random message writes into linear writes."^[4]