1 Getting to know Kafka as an Architect
This chapter covers
- Principles of event-driven architecture
- Overview of the Kafka ecosystem
- Utilizing Kafka in enterprise environments
An architect’s role involves choosing how systems communicate, and one proven method for coordinating distributed work is through events. Several technologies exist, each with trade-offs in reliability, flexibility, and integration complexity. Apache Kafka is a widely adopted, open-source event streaming platform: it began as a high-throughput message broker and has grown into an ecosystem for real-time processing, backed by durable event storage.
Kafka is crucial because it bridges the gap between event and action: producers publish once, and many consumers react with low latency. That decoupling enables real-time fraud checks, personalized experiences, and operational alerts—without brittle point-to-point integrations. Its strength lies in enabling real-time event processing, which has become a business imperative across industries like financial services (fraud detection), retail (personalized recommendations), and manufacturing (predictive maintenance), where delays mean lost value.