Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Word of the Day: Apache Kafka

Word of the Day WhatIs.com
Daily updates on the latest technology terms | March 19, 2019
Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system that receives data from disparate source systems and makes the data available to target systems in real time. Kafka is written in Scala and Java and is often associated with real-time event stream processing for big data.

Like other messaging systems, Kafka facilitates the asynchronous data exchange between processes, applications and servers. Unlike other messaging systems, however, Kafka has very low overhead because it does not track consumer behavior and delete messages that have been read. Instead, Kafka retains all messages for a set amount of time and makes the consumer responsible for tracking which messages have been read.


Kafka software runs on one or more servers and each node in a Kafka cluster is called a broker. Kafka uses Apache ZooKeeper to manage clusters; the broker's job is to help producer applications write data to topics and consumer applications read from topics. Topics are divided into partitions to make them more manageable and Kafka guarantees strong ordering for each partition. Because messages are written into a partition in a particular order and are read in the same order, each partition essentially becomes a commit log that can function as a distributed source of truth for a system's events.

 

Kafka's code base, which was originally developed at LinkedIn to provide a mechanism for parallel load in Hadoop systems, became an open source project under the Apache Software Foundation in 2011. In 2014, the developers at LinkedIn who created Kafka started a company called Confluent to facilitate Kafka deployments and support enterprise-level Kafka-as-a-service products. Version 5.0 of the Confluent Platform, which was commercially released in 2018, improves the handling of application client failover for disaster recovery and reduces reliance on Java for streaming analytics applications.

Quote of the Day

 
"It's a bold claim, but I think the emergence of stream processing and the event-driven architecture will have as big an impact in reworking how companies make use of data as relational databases did." - Bill Bejeck

Learning Center

 

Aerospike database garners Spark, Kafka connectors
The Aerospike database has found a place in large-scale systems for e-commerce. New connectors for Apache Spark and Apache Kafka position it for use in analytics, as well as in-memory transactional operations.

Confluent Platform 5.0 aims to mainstream Kafka streaming
Confluent Platform 5.0 adds a GUI supporting KSQL operations, as well as user-defined functions. Forged by Kafka originators, the software looks to ease development and take Kafka data streaming to the mainstream.

Real-time streaming analytics systems need help from message brokers
Apache Kafka and other message queuing tools can help IT and analytics teams manage complex flows of data in real-time streaming analytics applications.

IIoT standards have yet to keep pace with IoT protocols
While many data transfer, processing and management protocols already exist for connected environments, IoT and IIoT standards are just now beginning to emerge.

Confluent's Kafka data-streaming framework gets 'SQL-ized'
As Kafka data streaming pursues real-time analytics, there's still a place there for SQL. That's the word from its original open source creators.

Quiz Yourself

 
Although big data is getting bigger all the time, much of the data being collected ___ useless.
a. is
b. are

Answer

Stay in Touch

 
For feedback about any of our definitions or to suggest a new definition, please contact me at: mrouse@techtarget.com

Visit the Word of the Day Archives and catch up on what you've missed!

FOLLOW US

TwitterRSS
About This E-Newsletter
This e-newsletter is published by the TechTarget network. To unsubscribe from Whatis.com, click here. Please note, this will not affect any other subscriptions you have signed up for.
TechTarget

TechTarget, Whatis, 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466. Contact: webmaster@techtarget.com

Copyright 2018 TechTarget. All rights reserved.

No comments: