Apache Kafka란 무엇인가요?

Apache Kafka is an open-source platform for handling streams of data in real time — think of it as a fast, reliable post office for your data.

Data is created constantly — clicks, sensor readings, the works. Traditional systems choke on that volume and speed. Kafka is built to move it all reliably.

Kafka treats all data as a continuous stream of events. Each event records something that happened, is immutable, ordered, and flows endlessly.

Kafka's strengths: scalability for huge volume, durability so data isn't lost, fault-tolerance through failures, and high throughput — millions of messages a second.

Picture an e-commerce site: every click and purchase is an event Kafka captures instantly. That powers real-time analytics, personalization, and fraud detection.

Kafka acts as a central hub so microservices can message each other without being directly wired together. That decoupling keeps systems flexible and easy to evolve.

Kafka is great for event sourcing: store every state change as an immutable event, not just the current value. You get a full audit trail and can rebuild past states.

Kafka has two main roles: producers write events and consumers read them. Events live in categories called topics.

You've got the picture: Kafka is a distributed streaming platform built for scale, durability, and fault-tolerance — analytics, messaging, event sourcing. Next: its core components.