I have mentioned Apache Kafka a couple of times when discussing Spring Cloud integration with message brokers. However, until now, we haven't run any samples based on that platform. The fact is that RabbitMQ tends to be the preferred choice when working with Spring Cloud projects, but Kafka is also worthy of our attention. One of its advantages over RabbitMQ is native support for partitioning, which is one of the most important features of Spring Cloud Stream.
Kafka is not a typical message broker. It is rather a distributed streaming platform. Its main feature is to allow you to publish and subscribe to streams of records. It is especially useful for real-time streaming applications that transform or react to streams of data. It is usually run as a cluster consisting of one or more servers, and stores streams of records in topics.