In the "Let’s Take a Look at…!" blog series I am going to explore interesting projects, developments and technologies in the data and streaming space. This can be KIPs and FLIPs, open-source projects, services, and more. The idea is to get some hands-on experience, learn about potential use cases and applications, and understand the trade-offs involved. If you think there’s a specific subject I should take a look at, let me know in the comments below! That guy above? Yep, that’s me, whenever someone says "Kafka queue". Because, that’s not what Apache Kafka is. At its core, Kafka is a distributed durable event log. Producers write events to a topic, organized in partitions which are distributed amongst the brokers of a Kafka cluster. Consumers, organized in groups, divide the partitions they process amongst themselves, so that each partition of a topic is read by exactly one consumer in the group.