What are the differences between Kafka and traditional message queues?

The key difference between Kafka and traditional message queues lies in their design and purpose. Traditional message queues are typically used for message transport, with point-to-point or publish/subscribe patterns. These queues ensure message reliability, order, and persistence, and usually have low latency.

Kafka is a distributed streaming platform designed for processing large-scale data streams, providing high throughput, low latency, and horizontal scalability. It uses a publish/subscribe model but also offers additional functionalities such as data storage, data partitioning, and data replication. Kafka is best suited for large-scale real-time data processing and analysis scenarios, such as log collection and monitoring data.