Apache Kafka Use Cases
The following are some top uses cases where Apache Kafka is used.
1. Messaging
Apache Kafka is used as a replacement for traditional message brokers like RabbitMQ. Message brokers are used for a variety of reasons such as to decouple processing from data producers, to buffer unprocessed messages, etc but if we compare messaging systems with Kafka then Kafka provides better throughput built-in partitioning, replication, and fault-tolerance which makes it a good solution for large scale message processing applications.
2. Website Activity Tracking
Apache Kafka's original use case was to track website activity such as page views, searches, uploads, or other actions performed by users. Such kind of activity tracking always requires a very high volume of throughput as messages are generated for each action and each user. These activities can be sent to real-time monitoring systems, real-time analytics platforms, and or to mass storage (like S3) for offline/batch processing.
3. Log Aggregation
Many organizations use Kafka as a log solution. Log aggregation is the process of collecting physical log files from servers and puts them in a central place such as a file server or HDFS for processing. Kafka extracts away the details of files and gives a cleaner abstraction of log or event data as a stream of messages.
4. Metrics
Apache Kafka is frequently used for operational monitoring data. This task includes aggregating statistics from distributed applications to produce centralized feeds of operational data.
5. Stream Processing
Apache Kafka is used for the streaming process which is done at multiple stages. In the multistage pipeline, the row data is used from Kafka topics, and aggregation and transformation are applied on it and then a new topic is ready for further processing.
6. Event Sourcing
Event sourcing is a way of application design in which state changes are logged as a time-ordered sequence of records. Kafka makes a great platform for event sourcing because it stores all records as a time-ordered sequence and provides the necessary ordering guarantees that an event store needs.
7. Commit Log
Apache Kafka is used for the external commit-log for a distributed system in which the logs help replicate the data in between nodes also used for re-syncing of failed nodes from a cluster.