Apache Kafka

Eric Computing

Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. It is, in its essence, a “massively scalable pub/sub message queue architected as a distributed transaction log”,[2] making it highly valuable for enterprise infrastructures.

The design is heavily influenced by transaction logs.[3]

History

Apache Kafka was originally developed by LinkedIn, and was subsequently open sourced in early 2011. Graduation from the Apache Incubator occurred on 23 October 2012. In November 2014, several engineers who built Kafka at LinkedIn created a new company named Confluent[4] with a focus on Kafka.

Enterprises that use Kafka

The following is a list of notable enterprises that have used or are using Kafka:

Kafka performance

Due to its ability to scale massively and it being largely used by enterprise-level infrastructures, tracking Kafka performance has become an increasingly important issue. There are currently several monitoring platforms to track Kafka performance, both open-source, like Linkedin’s Burrow, as well as paid, like Datadog.

The key metrics[15] these platforms track consist of:

Kafka is also often used in conjunction with ZooKeeper for deployment management, which necessitates monitoring its metrics alongside Kafka clusters.[16]

See also

References

 

“Monitor Kafka with Datadog”. Datadog. 2016-04-06. Retrieved 2016-06-01.

External links