chapter one

1 Welcome to the Kafka event streaming platform

 

This chapter covers

  • Defining event streaming and events
  • Introducing the Kafka event streaming platform
  • Applying the platform to a concrete example

We live in a world today of unprecedented connectivity. We can watch movies on demand on an IPad, get instant notification of various accounts' status, pay bills, and deposit checks from our smartphones. If you chose to, you can recieve updates on events happening around the world 24/7 by watching your social media accounts.

While this constant influx of information creates more entertainment and opportunities for the human consumer, more and more of the users of this information are software systems using other software systems. Consequently, businesses are forced to find ways to keep up with the demand and leverage the available flow of information to improve the customer experience and improve their bottom lines. For today’s developer, we can sum up all this digital activity in one term: event streaming.

1.1 What is event streaming ?

1.1.1 What is an event ?

1.1.2 An event stream example

1.1.3 Who needs event streamimg applications

1.2 Introducing the Apache Kafka® event streaming platform

1.2.1 Kafka brokers

1.2.2 Schema registry

1.2.3 Producer and consumer clients

1.2.4 Kafka Connect

1.2.5 Kafka Streams

1.2.6 ksqlDB

1.3 A concrete example of applying the Kafka event streaming platform

1.4 Summary