Summary

In this chapter, we covered the fundamental concepts and architecture behind Apache Kafka – a popular open source platform for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications.

You learned how Kafka provides distributed, partitioned, replicated, and fault-tolerant PubSub messaging through its topics and brokers architecture. Through hands-on examples, you gained practical experience with setting up local Kafka clusters using Docker, creating topics, and producing and consuming messages. You understood offsets and consumer groups that enable fault tolerance and parallel consumption from topics.

We introduced Kafka Connect, which allows us to stream data between Kafka and external systems such as databases. You implemented a source connector to ingest changes from a PostgreSQL database into Kafka topics. We also set up a sink connector to deliver the messages from Kafka to object storage in AWS S3 in real time.

The highlight was building an end-to...