• Distributed, resilient, architecture, fault tolerant
• Can scale to millions of messages
• High performance - Latency less than 10ms - Real time

Use cases

• Messaging system
• Activity Tracking
• Gather metrics from many different locations
• Application log gathering
• Stream processing (with the kafka streams api or spark)
• De-coupling of system dependencies
• Integrations with spark, flink, storm, hadoop, and many other big data technologies

Who uses kafka?

• Netflix - uses kafka to apply recommendations in real-time while you are watching tv shows.
• Uber uses kafka to gather user, taxi and trip data in real-time to compute and forecast demand and compute surge pricing in real-time
• Linked in uses kafka to prevent spam, collect user interactions to make better connection recommendations in real time.

• Kafka is only used as a transport mechanism! Developers still need to write code to do these things.