sensorsApache Kafka
Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform. Think of it as a high-performance, fault-tolerant sequence of records. It allows you to publish and subscribe to streams of events, similar to a message queue or enterprise messaging system, but with massive scale and persistence.
databaseKafka Brokers
A Kafka Broker is a dedicated server within a cluster that handles the storage and retrieval of event streams. Every message produced is assigned an Offset — a unique identifier representing its position in the partition log. By using multiple brokers, Kafka achieves Horizontal Scaling and high availability through data replication.
smart_toyKafka Consumers
Consumers are applications that subscribe to topics and process the message stream. To manage high-throughput data, multiple consumers can work together in a Consumer Group. Kafka manages the partition assignment to ensure each partition is processed by only one consumer in a group, ensuring strict ordering within a partition.