Difference Between Kafka , Apache Kafka & Confluent Kafka
This post explains the common confusion which most of the people have on the reference of Kafka , Apache Kafka & Confluent Kafka and the differences that they have. May be due to the usage of the Term Kafka in various contexts .
Apache Kafka is an open-source Stream Processing Platform . It is a message broker/publish-subscribe system in its core . And it has Java Producer/Consumer client libraries to read/write data from an application, Kafka Connect framework to import/export data from Kafka, and Kafka Streams library to process data stored in Kafka. Let me try to help you out clarifying the things a bit .- Firstly Kafka & Apache Kafka - they are the SAME !
- Kafka or Apache Kafka is a COMPLETELY OPEN SOURCE project. Freely available to download and use from the apache library - https://kafka.apache.org/downloads.
- Confluent Kafka - Well there is nothing called Confluent Kafka ! Confluent is basically a Company founded by the folks who had created and contributed to Kafka (They Still do !). But Confluent has other Products which are addendum to the Kafka system e.g Confluent Platform , REST API , KSQL(Kafka SQL) etc and they can provide Enterprise support . Please note , Confluent platform uses Kafka which is the SAME as the Apache Kafka.