2. APIs

Kafka includes five core apis:

  1. The Producer API allows applications to send streams of data to topics in the Kafka cluster.
  2. The Consumer API allows applications to read streams of data from topics in the Kafka cluster.
  3. The Streams API allows transforming streams of data from input topics to output topics.
  4. The Connect API allows implementing connectors that continually pull from some source system or application into Kafka or push from Kafka into some sink system or application.
  5. The Admin API allows managing and inspecting topics, brokers, and other Kafka objects.

Kafka exposes all its functionality over a language independent protocol which has clients available in many programming languages. However only the Java clients are maintained as part of the main Kafka project, the others are available as independent open source projects. A list of non-Java clients is available here.