Apache Kafka & Event Streaming

Curated Kafka resources: the distributed log, partitioning, consumer groups, Kafka Connect, and building event-driven data pipelines.

Best resources to learn Apache Kafka & Event Streaming

• Kafka Documentation -- Introduction

  The official introduction explains the log abstraction, partitioning, and consumer groups -- the three concepts everything else is built on. Read this first.

• Confluent: What is Apache Kafka?

  Confluent's accessible introduction to Kafka concepts, use cases, and ecosystem. A good complement to the official docs.

• Confluent: Kafka Tutorials

  Hands-on tutorials for Kafka patterns: producers, consumers, Kafka Streams, and Schema Registry. The best practical starting point for the Kafka ecosystem.

Kafka is the dominant message broker for data engineering workloads. Its durability, replay capability, and ecosystem (Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, ksqlDB) make it the default for event-driven architectures.

The three concepts everything else is built on: the log abstraction (immutable, append-only, replayable), partitioning (parallelism and ordering), and consumer groups (scalable, fault-tolerant consumption). Understand these before touching Kafka Streams or Kafka Connect.