The Apache Kafka distributed streaming platform is not changing but its typical use cases are. Commercial Apache distributor Confluent issued its third annual Apache Kafka Report, which surveyed over 600 users of the technology, a 71 percent increase compared to last year’s sample. What appears to be a broadening user community has a better idea of Kafka’s business value. A more nuanced definition of the technology and increased adoption of microservices results in a different outlook on Kafka’s association with the term “stream processing.”
Data pipelines and messaging are now the top two uses of Kafka, followed by microservices/event processing and stream processing. The addition of several answer choices partially explains significant drops in the use of Kafka for stream processing (66 percent in 2017 to 48 percent in 2018) and data integration (60 percent to 46 percent). The chart below shows that people distinguish between the use of Kafka capabilities for event processing and streaming ETL, resulting in the broad stream processing category getting fewer responses.
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