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7 Popular Use Cases for Apache Kafka
#1 Messaging
2 min readJan 17, 2022
- Message brokers are used for a variety of reasons (to decouple processing from data producers, to buffer unprocessed messages, etc).
- In comparison to most messaging systems Kafka has better throughput, built-in partitioning, replication, and fault-tolerance which makes it a good solution for large scale message processing applications.
- Messaging uses are often comparatively low-throughput, but may require low end-to-end latency and often depend on the strong durability guarantees Kafka provides.
- Kafka is comparable to traditional messaging systems such as ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ.
#2 Website Activity Tracking
- Site activity (page views, searches, or other actions users may take) is published to central topics with one topic per activity type. These feeds are available for subscription for a range of use cases including real-time processing, real-time monitoring, and loading into Hadoop or offline data warehousing systems for offline processing and reporting.
- Activity tracking is often very high volume as many activity messages are generated for each user page view.
#3 Metrics
- Kafka is often used for operational monitoring data.
- This involves aggregating statistics from distributed applications to produce centralized feeds of operational data.
