Technology has helped many companies advance forward. There is a wide variety of advances in this field that keep many industries afloat. One example of these technological advances is Apache Kafka.
This messaging platform is an essential part of some of the world’s most well-known businesses. We’ll focus on some companies that use Apache Kafka.
Defining Apache Kafka
There are many messaging platforms that exist to help companies provide assistance to their customers. Apache Kafka is this very type of message center. The system has become extremely helpful in accomplishing this goal. Kafka is an open-source distribution publish-subscribe messaging platform that companies such as data science software industry leader TIBCO use. The Kafka streams have been purpose-built to deal with real-time streaming data for distributed streaming, pipelining, and data replay for rapid and scalable functions.
Broken down into its simplest functions, a producer app sends data to a cluster that then routes this same information to the consumer app. The Apache Kafka message center acts as a broker-based solution that performs through maintaining data streams. These data streams are maintained as records located in a cluster of servers. These are your clusters created by Kafka. These servers can reach many separate data centers while providing data persistence.
Kafka is being used for a variety of tasks. First, it can be utilized for reliable data exchange between different components. It can also partition messaging workloads. This occurs as application requirements become different. Kafka allows for real-time streaming for data processing. The message system also allows support for data/message replay. Apache Kafka, through its many components and uses (Kafka connect, Kafka stream), is a message center platform that brings many benefits to companies.
Netflix
One of the leading streaming video companies in the world uses Kafka. Netflix utilizes Kafka streams to help it in its video streaming practices. To successfully accomplish getting this service out to its many subscribers, Netflix uses something called the Keystone Data Pipeline. In the year 2016, this pipeline was helping to process 500 billion data-focused events per day. Some of these activities included error logs, user-viewing activities, UI activities, and troubleshooting events.
This real-time data was focused on providing information from the various geographic regions that Netflix serves. When it comes to the Keystone Pipeline, this is a unified event publishing, collecting, and routing infrastructure for batch and stream processing. Where Kafka comes in is through its clusters, which help the Keystone Pipeline. Their pipeline uses 36 Kafka clusters to process billions of messages that were sent through the Keystone pipeline daily.
When it comes to Netflix, these Kafka clusters are doing a number of things. They are enabling applications to publish or subscribe to data or event streams, and they are storing data records accurately. These Kafka clusters have the ability for real-time, high-volume data processing, and they can receive and process trillions of data records per day. Netflix is but one example of an industry leader using Apache Kafka.
Another industry leader that uses Apache Kafka is LinkedIn. The world’s largest professional network has used Kafka to help it maintain its standard of providing quality service to professionals who tap into their network daily. The system was originally used by LinkedIn to be a stream processing platform. They use over 100 Kafka clusters and approximately 4,000 brokers. Kafka is used by LinkedIn for powering use cases such as activity tracking, message exchanges, and metric gathering.
Kafka is structured to be specifically tailored to operations and scale at LinkedIn. The Kafka ecosystem at LinkedIn includes applications with the Kafka client, REST proxy for serving non-Java clients, and a pipeline completeness audit. Apache Kafka has become instrumental in LinkedIn’s current success in its industry.
