Top 10 Kafka Features: Reasons Behind the Popularity of Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka is one of the most popular tools in the big data world. Read on to get a nice high-level overview explaining why.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.
Join For Free1. Objective
Today, we will discuss all the features of Kafka, like scalability, reliability, durability, that show why Kafka is so popular. We will discuss each features in detail. But before that, let’s understand what Kafka is.
2. What Is Apache Kafka?
Apache Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system for handling a high volume of data that enables us to pass messages from one end-point to another. It is suitable for both offline and online message consumption. Moreover, in order to prevent data loss, Kafka messages are persisted on disk and replicated within the cluster. In addition, it is built on top of the ZooKeeper synchronization service. While it comes to real-time streaming data analysis, it can also integrate very well with Apache Storm and Spark. There are many more features of Apache Kafka. Let’s discuss them in detail.
3. Top 10 Apache Kafka Features
a. Scalability
Apache Kafka can handle scalability in all the four dimensions, i.e. event producers, event processors, event consumers, and event connectors. In other words, Kafka scales easily without downtime.
b. High-Volume
Kafka can work with a huge volume of data streams, easily.
c. Data Transformations
Kafka offers provisions for deriving new data streams using the data streams from producers.
d. Fault Tolerance
Kafka clusters can handle failures with the masters and databases.
e. Reliability
Since Kafka is distributed, partitioned, replicated, and fault tolerant, it is very reliable.
f. Durability
It is durable because Kafka uses Distributed commit logs, which means messages persist on disk as fast as possible.
g. Performance
For both publishing and subscribing messages, Kafka has high throughput. Even if many TBs of messages are stored, it maintains stable performance.
h. Zero Downtime
Kafka is very fast and guarantees zero downtime and zero data loss.
i. Extensibility
There are many ways by which applications can plug in and make use of Kafka. In addition, Kafka offers ways to write new connectors as needed.
j. Replication
By using ingest pipelines, it can replicate events.
4. Conclusion
We have seen the best Apache Kafka features, that make it very popular. However, if you want to ask any query regarding these features of Kafka, feel free to ask through the comment tab. Hope this helps!
Published at DZone with permission of Shailna Patidar. See the original article here.
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.
Comments