Kafka Explained
Why Did Kafka Come Into the Picture? Before jumping into understanding Kafka, let’s first understand why we even need it. Imagine a delivery app like Zomato. A delivery partner is constantly moving...

Source: DEV Community
Why Did Kafka Come Into the Picture? Before jumping into understanding Kafka, let’s first understand why we even need it. Imagine a delivery app like Zomato. A delivery partner is constantly moving, and their live location needs to be updated to the customer every second. Now, think about how you would design this system: Every second, the delivery partner’s app sends location data That data is stored in a database The system then fetches the latest data and sends it to the customer This works fine for a small number of users. 👉 For example: If there are 100 delivery partners, a database can handle it easily But what happens when the system scales? Thousands of delivery partners sending updates every second Millions of database writes and reads Increased latency and system overload 👉 At scale, this approach becomes inefficient and difficult to manage. *Enter Kafka * This is where Kafka comes in. Kafka is a free, open-source event streaming platform designed to handle large volumes of