Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform designed to handle real-time data feeds. It operates on a few core components, primarily Kafka brokers, which are dedicated servers responsible for receiving, storing, processing, and distributing events. These brokers work in clusters and are managed by a server called ZooKeeper, ensuring synchronization and reliability.

At the heart of Kafka’s functionality are topics, which serve as categories for the data being streamed. Each broker can host multiple topics, allowing for organized data management. Producers publish data to these topics, while consumers read and process the data. This architecture enables efficient handling of large volumes of data in real-time, making Kafka suitable for various applications, such as monitoring, analytics, and event-driven architectures.

To build an end-to-end event streaming pipeline, one can integrate data sources, create topics, develop producers and consumers, and utilize databases for data storage and analysis. This flexibility allows for diverse use cases, from weather data analysis to social media monitoring ¹.