The TL;DR
Apache Kafka is a framework for streaming data between internal systems, and Confluent offers Kafka as a managed service.
- We’re dealing with a lot of data these days – Big Data™ – and recording, storing, and moving it around is hard and expensive
- Kafka helps stream that data throughout your company and distribute it to the systems that want to use it
- The Kafka architecture works through a publish-subscribe pattern
- Kafka 101 terminology: producers, consumers, messages, and topics
Kafka is relatively new, but it's getting pretty popular: managed service provider Confluent, founded by the original creators of Kafka, has been a public company since 2021 and continues to grow rapidly.