In short, Kafka is used for stream processing, website activity tracking, metrics collection and monitoring, log aggregation, real-time analytics, CEP, ingesting data into Spark, ingesting data into Hadoop, CQRS, replay messages, error recovery, and guaranteed distributed commit log for in-memory computing ( ...

What is the purpose of Apache Kafka?

Kafka is primarily used to build real-time streaming data pipelines and applications that adapt to the data streams. It combines messaging, storage, and stream processing to allow storage and analysis of both historical and real-time data.

What companies use Apache Kafka?

Kafka is used heavily in the big data space as a reliable way to ingest and move large amounts of data very quickly. According to stackshare there are 741 companies that use Kafka. Among them Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest, Coursera and of course Linkendin.