Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that lets you publish and subscribe to streams of records. It's like a giant message queue that can handle trillions of events per day, making it perfect for building real-time data pipelines and streaming apps that power everything from fraud detection to ad targeting.

How to use it in a sentence

• I was going to spend the weekend hiking, but then I remembered I need to finish setting up our new Kafka cluster. Guess I'll be spending my Saturday night partitioning logs instead of enjoying the great outdoors.

• Our latest feature is so popular, it's pushing over 100,000 events per second through Kafka. Looks like I'll be pulling another all-nighter to keep this thing from falling over like a house of cards.

If you actually want to learn more...

• Kafka, Samza, and the Unix Philosophy of Distributed Data dives into how Kafka and Samza embody Unix principles to enable building robust, scalable data infrastructure.

• Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza explains how Kafka and stream processing with Samza can be used to implement materialized views and enable new application architectures.

• Using logs to build a solid data infrastructure (or: why dual writes are a bad idea) discusses how Kafka's log-based approach provides a solid foundation for data integration and real-time processing.

Note: the Developer Dictionary is in Beta. Please direct feedback to skye@statsig.com.