Kafka is a platform
A platform serves as the foundation for building applications.
Streaming platform
On-demand online entertainment platform that serves live content on-demand. Netflix is a streaming platform.
Streaming platform in the technology world
With netflix still in your halo, streaming platform in the tech world would be a platform that can serve live streams of data. Kafka being a streaming platform would mean that applications can be built using Kafka which could process live streams of data.
Event streaming platform
But it is not just any data, it is event data. Kafka is an event streaming platform.
Collect, store and process data
Kafka is an event streaming platform that can collect, store and process live streams of real time data at scale.
Scalable
Kafka is a scalable technology. So, if there is a surge in the data, the technology automatically scales. Whatever the kafka architecture is, the components would start having more instances as needed by the scenario of the data growth. Kafka is scalable.
Real time
It is able to process the events real time. Real time as in right when it happens. If you need oxygen on top of the mountain and you send an event to kafka, oxygen would be served in real time. If the vitals of a patient drops at a hospital, the nurse is paged right away — a meeting request is not sent to the nurse.
That is what kafka is as a technology. Kafka is an event streaming platform that is used to collect, store and process real time data streams at scale.
