Real-time streaming components

In the following sections we will walk through some important real-time streaming components.

Message queue

The message queue lets you publish and subscribe to a stream of events/records. There are various alternatives we can use as a message queue in our real-time stream architecture. For example, there is RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, and Kafka. Out of these, Kafka has gained tremendous popularity due to its various unique features. Hence, we will discuss the architecture of Kafka in detail. A discussion of RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ is beyond the scope of this book.

So what is Kafka?

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