What are KafkaConnect and KafkaStreams?

Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams are two crucial components provided by Apache Kafka, used for building real-time data pipelines and stream processing applications.

Kafka Connect is a tool for data integration that connects external systems to a Kafka cluster, allowing data to be passed from various sources and destinations to Kafka. By providing a set of pluggable connectors, Kafka Connect supports a variety of data sources and destinations such as databases, file systems, and message queues. With Kafka Connect, users can easily build and manage data pipelines, ensuring reliable data transmission and transformation.

Kafka Streams is a library for real-time data processing that allows developers to build complex stream processing applications, read data streams from Kafka topics, and transform, analyze, and aggregate them. Kafka Streams provides a high-level API that simplifies the development and deployment process of stream processing applications, while also offering high performance and scalability. With Kafka Streams, users can process large-scale data streams in real-time and build real-time data processing and analytics systems.