1 Getting to know Kafka as an architect
This chapter covers
Apache Kafka has grown from a high-throughput messaging system into a critical component of modern data architectures. The Kafka ecosystem now powers event-driven systems, large-scale data pipelines, and real-time analytics. It is a widely adopted, open-source streaming platform and its capabilities are impressive. But making the most of Kafka requires more than just getting it to run—it demands thoughtful architectural design.
Kafka plays a crucial role because it bridges the gap between event and action: producers publish once, and many consumers react, with Kafka providing low latency. That decoupling enables business systems to respond to events quickly and without brittle point-to-point integrations. Consider real-time order processing in e-commerce, for instance, where one event, a customer placing an order, gets published to a service, and many independent consumers—such as inventory, payment, shipping, and analytics—react in real time without any direct integrations. Kafka’s strength lies in enabling real-time event processing, which has become a business imperative across industries, especially in critical functions where delays mean lost value—like fraud detection, personalized recommendations, and predictive maintenance.