Apache Kafka Reaches 1.0 Milestone for Open-Source Distributed Streaming Platform

Sean Michael

Updated Ā· Nov 06, 2017

In the modern enterprise apps world, distributed streaming data is a core component, and perhaps no other technology is as widely used for that purpose as is Apache Kafka. On Nov. 1, the Apache Kafka 1.0.0 release officially debuted, marking an important new stage in the evolution of the widely used open-source project.

“Apache Kafka is playing a bigger role as companies are moving to real-time streaming and embracing stream processing,” said Jun Rao, vice president of Apache Kafka. “The 1.0.0 release is an important milestone for the Apache Kafka community as we’re committed to making it ready for enterprise adoption.”

Kafka enables users to read, write and suscribe to streams of data, as well as providing the ability to have stream processing applications handle and react to events and data in live time. Additionally, Kafka has a storage component that enables organizations to store the data streams in a distributed fault-tolerant cluster.

The Kafka 1.0 milestone is all about stability and performance, with multiple incremental improvements that are designed to help provide enterprises with increased confidence about using Kafka at massive scale.

Kafka is already in use at massive scale by several of the Internet’s leading Web properties, including both Netlflix and Uber.

“Kafka enabled us to process trillions of messages per day in a scalable way,” Allen Wang, senior software engineer at Netflix, stated. “This opened up a completely new frontier for us to efficiently process data in motion to help us better serve Netflix members around the world.”

“Apache Kafka is Uber’s data platform that reliably delivers trillions of messages per day, and empowers the real-time business intelligence to serve all the users around the world,” Lei Lin, engineer manager at Uber, stated. “It’s very exciting to see the new milestone of Apache Kafka 1.0 release, and we are looking forward to this release.”

While many organization make use of the freely available open-source Apache Kafka project, there is also commercial support available from different organizations. Among the enterprises that commercially support Kafka is Confluent, which raised $50 million in funding in March 2017 to help advance its Kafka support. Confluent was founded by the creators of the open-source Apache Kafka project

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

Sean Michael
Sean Michael

Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.

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