Below we describe the Top 10 Kafka Features that make it the best technology for many data streaming applications.
#1 Scalability
Apache Kafka can scale data producers, data brokers, and data consumers. Whether you have a few data producers creating a large dataset sending to many groups of data consumers or the other way around — Kafka has you covered.
#2 High-Volume
Kafka can handle moving any amount of data from bytes to petabytes a day.
#3 Guaranteed Once Processing
Kafka, a distributed application, will coordinate Kafka brokers to guarantee data is only sent once.
#4 Guaranteed Ordering
While scaling horizontally across many servers, Kafka maintains the ordering of your data.
#5 Reliability
Kafka is a distributed application with a configurable amount of replicas offering high availability.
#6 Off-site Replication
Kafka can replicate all data to another cluster in another datacenter keeping your data online in the case of a disaster.
#7 Performance
Kafka performs with any amount of data sent through it, reducing server costs.
#8 Zero Downtime
Kafka has no downtime requirements for upgrading. Kafka cluster health can be monitored by a myriad of tools to allow preventative maintenance.
In fact, at Dattell our managed Kafka as a Service comes with a 99.99% uptime guarantee for Kafka hosted on your servers. Learn more about Apache Kafka as a managed service here.
#9 Extensibility
Kafka’s popularity over the last several years has encouraged many other applications to develop integrations with Kafka. This makes for the easy addition of new functionality, such as plugging in to other applications.
#10 Free To Use
Apache Kafka was developed by LinkedIn and subsequently donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Because it is open source there are no license fees to use Kafka! This software is completely free.