FAQs

What is Apache Kafka used for?

Kafka is an open source software which provides a framework for storing, reading and analysing streaming data. Being open source means that it is essentially free to use and has a large network of users and developers who contribute towards updates, new features and offering support for new users.

Is Apache Kafka free?

Apache Kafka is free, and Confluent Cloud is very cheap for small use cases, about $1 a month to produce, store, and consume a GB of data.

Is Apache Kafka open source?

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. The source code of Ceph application is available at Github.

What language is Kafka written in?

Kafka started as a project in LinkedIn and was later open-sourced to facilitate its adoption. It is written in Scala and Java, and it is part of the open-source Apache Software Foundation.

Why Kafka is so fast?

Compression & Batching of Data: Kafka batches the data into chunks which helps in reducing the network calls and converting most of the random writes to sequential ones. It’s more efficient to compress a batch of data as compared to compressing individual messages.