What Is Apache Kafka?

We have read everything about the need for data analysis. In order to increase the efficiency and productivity of a company, it is essential to analyze the massive amounts of data generated every second. But, to analyze the data, it is first required to be collected. For a system to process the data flawlessly, it has to be capable of grasping the data and make it available to the users. This is where Apache Kafka comes into action.

As we are living in a digital era, it has become mandatory to collect and analyze real-time data. The need for real-time data analytics is realized today by every industrial domain. To improve performance and make relevant decisions quickly, real-time analytics has gained popularity in the past few years. There are projects launched by Apache such as Kafka, Storm, Flume, and Spark, that are related to stream processing.

Naukri.com has 16554 Kafka job openings for Kafka certified developers. The official home page of Kafka states that more than 80% of Fortune 100 companies trust and utilize Kafka. There are more than 5 million unique lifetime downloads of Kafka and it is trusted by thousands of organizations that range from internet giants to car manufacturers to stock exchanges. Since it is adopted in every industrial sector, Kafka Certification training can help you move your career in Big Data.

What is Apache Kafka?

“Apache Kafka is an open-source, distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.”

This is how Apache Kafka is defined on its official website.

So when you need to make quick decisions on real-time data, you need Kafka. Developed by the Apache Software Foundation, Kafka is an open-source, fast, fault-tolerant, and highly scalable message broker application. It is written in both Scala and Java languages. The design of Kafka is primarily based on transaction logs. It provides you with a unified, low latency, a high-throughput platform to let you handle real-time data feeds.

Initially developed for a messaging queue, Apache Kafka is now capable of handling trillions of events that occur in a day. A message queuing system is one that is able to transfer data between applications such that applications can focus on the data rather than the way it is shared or transferred.

Features of Kafka

With the scalability feature of Kafka, you can scale production clusters that may reach up to a thousand brokers, trillions of messages per day, hundreds of thousands of partitions, and petabytes of data. In addition, you can elastically expand and contract storage and processing as per the requirement. The scalability feature is facilitated as it works with Hbase, Flafka, Spark, and Flink for analyzing and processing real-time data.

Kafka is so popular because of its ability to provide higher throughput, reliability, and replication. This feature allows you to deliver messages at network limited throughput by utilizing a cluster of machines with as low latency as 2ms.

When it comes to storage and caching, Kafka utilizes a file system, which makes it fast, thereby preventing data loss and making it fault-tolerant. Also, it facilitates permanent storage by storing streams of data securely in a distributed, durable, fault-tolerant cluster.

Kafka enables you to stretch clusters efficiently over availability zones or you can also connect different clusters across geographic locations. This makes Kafka highly available.

Advantages of Kafka

Apache Kafka has several advantages that make it popular among thousands of industries, regardless of its type. Let us have a look.

• Durable

Kafka is durable in the sense that it allows you to replicate messages, and those messages persist on the disk as fast as possible, thus making it fast and durable as well.

• Tracks web activities

Kafka stores and sends events on the web for processing in real-time; this way it keeps track of the activities on the web.

• Standard Format

The data available in different formats is transformed into a standard format hence eliminating ambiguity if any.

• Highly Scalable

As mentioned earlier, the high scalability of Kafka makes it popular. It allows you to scale trillions of messages generated per day, petabytes of data, and millions of partitions.

• Continuous streaming

Kafka is capable of keeping up the continuous processing of streaming data.

• Fault-tolerant

The high availability feature of Kafka makes it resilient to failures occurring at the node and supports automatic recovery.

• High-throughput

Kafka is known for handling high volumes of data and that too at high velocity. Also, it can handle thousands of messages per second eventually giving you high throughput.

Career Scope in Apache Kafka

After hitting 1.1 trillion messages per day, Apache Kafka has joined the four comma group and has become popular across the globe. LinkedIn has deployed Kafka more than 1.1 trillion times and has reported it as the largest deployment of Kafka in production at any organization.

Many of the tech giants have deployed Kafka and received benefits from it. Some of them are Netflix, LinkedIn, Twitter, Mozilla, Oracle, and more. Apart from tech giants, other sectors such as manufacturing, insurance, banking, telecom and more have also benefited from Kafka.

This has increased the number of jobs in Kafka. The different job roles you can go with in Kafka are:

• Kafka Developer
• Kafka Project Manager
• Big Data Architect in Kafka
• Kafka Testing Professionals

As per Indeed.com, the average annual salary of a Kafka professional is around USD 122,000. This is almost 112% higher than the median salaries of other job roles.

You can learn Kafka and give a boost to your career if you are a developer, testing professional, big data architect, or project manager.

Conclusion

The de-facto standard for real-time data analytics, Apache Kafka is something that, if learned, can make your career reach new heights. Getting trained and certified makes you the most preferred candidate for recruiters.

You can go with online training for getting certified. There are several benefits of taking online training such as flexible learning hours, training as per your knowledge level, and the mode of learning of your choice.

Get yourself enrolled now!