Introduction On the official website, Kafka is described as an “open-source distributed event streaming platform”. The Apache Foundation is a nonprofit corporation created in 1999 whose objective is to support open-source projects. It provides infrastructure, tools, processes, and legal support to projects to help them develop and succeed. It is the world’s largest open source foundation and as of 2021, it supports over 300 projects totaling over 200 million lines of code. The source code of Kafka is not only available but the protocols used by clients and servers are also documented on the official site. This allows third parties to write their own compatible clients and tools. It’s also noteworthy that the development of Kafka happens in the open. All discussions (new features, bugs, fixes, releases) happen on public mailing lists and any changes that may impact users have to be voted on by the community. This also means Apache Kafka is not controlled by a single company that can c