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Introduction

We recently published a series of tutorial videos and tweets on the Apache Kafka^® platform. So now you know there’s a thing called Kafka, but before you put your hands to the keyboard and start writing code, you need to form a mental model of what the thing is. These videos give you the basics you need to know to have the broad grasp on Kafka necessary to continue learning and eventually start coding. This article summarizes those videos.

Events

Pretty much all of the programs you’ve ever written respond to events of some kind: the mouse moving, input becoming available, web forms being submitted, bits of JSON being posted to your endpoint, the sensor on the pear tree detecting that a partridge has landed on it, etc. Kafka encourages you to see the world as sequences of events, which it models as key-value pairs. The key and the value have some kind of structure, usually represented in your language’s type system, but fundamentally they can be anything. Events are immutable, as it is (sometimes tragically) impossible to change the past.

Source: DZone