Apache Kafka® Delivers Scalable Data Transport and Storage

The open-source Apache Kafka platform is the proven leader for scalable, real-time data transport and storage, offering unmatched performance for ELT, ETL, and streaming applications.

What is Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka enables businesses to build scalable, real-time data pipelines for efficiently transporting, storing, and processing large volumes of data, ensuring low-latency data flow to drive analytics, monitoring, and event-driven applications.

Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform that allows you to build real-time data pipelines and applications. It is designed for high-throughput, low-latency data streaming, making it ideal for event-driven architectures, real-time analytics, and continuous data integration across diverse systems.

Apache Kafka was originally developed at LinkedIn in 2010 to handle large-scale data streaming needs, and was later open-sourced through the Apache Software Foundation in 2011. Since then, it has evolved into the industry-leading distributed event-streaming platform, renowned for its high-throughput, fault tolerance, and scalability, now powering data pipelines and real-time analytics at major companies like Netflix, Uber, and Twitter.

https://kafka.apache.org

Common Use Cases for Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is widely used for handling real-time data across industries. Key use cases include:

Real-time data streaming

Kafka allows organizations to stream real-time data from various sources to enhance operational efficiency and decision-making.

Event-driven architectures

Kafka is used for event-driven applications where systems need to react to real-time events, powering event-sourcing and microservices communication.

ELT, ETL, and data integration

Kafka allows organizations to stream real-time data from various sources to enhance operational efficiency and decision-making.

Benefits of the Apache Kafka Framework

Seamless scalability for growing data needs

Kafka is designed to scale effortlessly to meet increasing data demands. As organizations grow and data volumes expand, Kafka can distribute workloads across multiple nodes in a cluster, ensuring smooth, uninterrupted processing. Its elastic scalability enables businesses to adjust their infrastructure dynamically based on their real-time data workloads, avoiding bottlenecks and ensuring high performance.

Support for event-driven services and applications

Kafka is the backbone of event-driven architectures, enabling microservices and applications to communicate asynchronously through real-time events. This decoupling of services increases flexibility and scalability, allowing businesses to build more resilient and responsive applications without tight dependencies between components.

Seamless data 
integration with analytics systems

Kafka can function as a central hub for connecting various systems, enabling seamless data integration between applications, databases, and analytics platforms. With connectors to a wide range of data sources and sinks, Kafka simplifies the flow of data across an organization, reducing silos and enhancing data accessibility for analytics applications and decision-making.

Real-time data processing for fresher insights

Kafka excels at real-time event processing, enabling organizations to derive insights from data as it flows in. This low-latency capability is essential for applications like fraud detection, and live analytics, where real-time action is critical. Kafka’s continuous data processing ensures businesses can make immediate decisions and rapidly respond to changes.

Developer-friendly APIs and robust ecosystem

Apache Kafka offers robust APIs for languages like Java and Python, making it accessible for developers building custom applications. With tools like Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect, developers can easily move and process data between systems, a key part of the creation of complex data pipelines and reducing time to market for real-time applications.

Strong open-source community

As an open-source project, Kafka benefits from a robust and growing community of contributors, ensuring the framework evolves with new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. The community provides support through forums, documentation, and regular updates, making it easier for organizations to adopt Kafka. The surrounding ecosystem also includes a rich array of integrations with popular data storage systems.

Who Benefits from Apache Kafka

Data Engineers benefit from Apache Kafka’s robust architecture for building scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines. Kafka simplifies the process of ingesting, processing, and distributing large volumes of data across various systems, enabling efficient workflow management.

Data Scientists use Kafka to access real-time data streams for analytics and model training. This allows them to develop and deploy machine learning models that can respond to live data, enhancing the accuracy and timeliness of insights.

Business Analysts leverage Kafka’s streaming capabilities to gain immediate insights from real-time data. With the ability to analyze live data streams, they can make faster decisions based on the most current information, improving overall business agility.

DevOps Engineers benefit from Kafka’s ease of integration and deployment in microservices architectures. Kafka helps facilitate communication between distributed applications, allowing for smoother operations and improved reliability in system performance.

Software Developers are able to use Kafka’s APIs and client libraries for building event-driven applications using Java, Scala, or Python. The ability to produce and consume messages seamlessly allows for the creation of responsive applications that can handle asynchronous communication effectively.

Data Architects can build on Kafka’s capability to serve as a central hub for data integration. Its extensive ecosystem of connectors allows for seamless data flow between various systems and platforms, helping architects design cohesive and flexible data infrastructures.

Decodable: Simplifying Apache Kafka with a Fully Managed Platform

Decodable offers a fully managed platform that simplifies the use of Apache Flink and Kafka, allowing you to focus on your applications without the complexity of infrastructure management. Key benefits include:

Easy pipeline deployment

Quickly deploy Kafka-based pipelines in minutes without managing complex infrastructure. Decodable allows seamless integration via our connector library, enabling users to transform and route data across different systems.

Real-time data integration

Perform real-time data transformations using Java, Python, and SQL, allowing you to integrate Kafka streams into your real-time ELT and ETL workflows effortlessly.

Automatic scaling

Decodable’s platform automatically scales Kafka pipelines to meet fluctuating workloads, ensuring high-throughput data streaming without manual intervention.

Enterprise-grade security

Decodable is SOC2 Type II certified and offers GDPR and HIPAA compliance, RBAC, and SSO.

Expert Support

Decodable is built and run by a team of stream processing, change data capture, data platform, and cloud service experts.

Learn more about Decodable

Managed Flink —
A Buyer's Guide

Our buyer’s guide provides a deep dive into the key considerations when evaluating real-time data platforms powered by Apache Flink.

Getting Started with Flink
and Flink SQL

In this tech talk, we guide you through how to get the most out of data movement and stream processing with Apache Flink and Flink SQL.

Architecture Guide for
Managed Flink

Gain an in-depth look at Decodable's architecture and explore key technical areas to inform your evaluations of real-time data platforms.