Kafka API is the De Facto Standard API for Event Streaming like Amazon S3 for Object Storage
Real-time beats slow data in most use cases across industries. The rise of event-driven architectures and data in motion powered by Apache Kafka enables enterprises to build real-time infrastructure and applications. This blog post explores why the Kafka API became the de facto standard API for event streaming like Amazon S3 for object storage, and the tradeoffs of these standards and corresponding frameworks, products, and cloud services.
The Forbes’ article “Event-Driven Architecture: This Time It’s Not A Fad” from April 2021 explained why enterprises are not just talking about event-driven real-time applications, but finally building them. Here are some arguments:
Real-time data in motion beats data at rest in databases or data lakes in most scenarios. There are a few exceptions that require batch processing:
Be aware that real-time data processing is more than just sending data from A to B in real-time (aka messaging or pub/sub). Real-time data processing requires integration and processing capabilities. If you send data into a database or data lake in real-time but have to wait until it is processed there in batch, it does not solve the problem.
