Kafka: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition
by Gwen Shapira, Todd Palino, Rajini Sivaram, Krit Petty
Foreword to the Second Edition
The first edition of Kafka: The Definitive Guide was published five years ago. At the time, we estimated that Apache Kafka was used in 30% of Fortune 500 companies. Today, over 70% of Fortune 500 companies are using Apache Kafka. It is still one of the most popular open source projects in the world and is at the center of a huge ecosystem.
Why all the excitement? I think it is because there has been a huge gap in our infrastructure for data. Traditionally, data management was all about storage—the file stores and databases that keep our data safe and let us look up the right bit at the right time. Huge amounts of intellectual energy and commercial investment have been poured into these systems. But a modern company isn’t just one piece of software with one database. A modern company is an incredibly complex system built out of hundreds or even thousands of custom applications, microservices, databases, SaaS layers, and analytics platforms. And increasingly, the problem we face is how to connect all this up into one company and make it all work together in real time.
This problem isn’t about managing data at rest—it is about managing data in motion. And right at the heart of that movement is Apache Kafka, which has become the de facto foundation to any platform for data in motion.
Through this journey, Kafka hasn’t remained static. What started as a bare-bones commit log has evolved as well: adding connectors and stream processing capabilities, and ...