Kafka Streams
Kafka Streams is a client library for building real-time streaming applications and microservices that process data stored in Apache Kafka. It provides a high-level DSL (Domain Specific Language) and low-level Processor API for transforming, aggregating, and joining data streams with exactly-once processing semantics. It is designed to be lightweight, scalable, and integrated directly with Kafka, eliminating the need for a separate processing cluster.
Developers should learn Kafka Streams when building real-time data pipelines, event-driven architectures, or stream processing applications that require low-latency processing of high-volume data streams. It is ideal for use cases like real-time analytics, fraud detection, monitoring systems, and data enrichment where data must be processed as it arrives, leveraging Kafka's durability and fault tolerance. Its integration with Kafka simplifies deployment and reduces operational overhead compared to external stream processing frameworks.