Producers and consumers

Apache Kafka^® is a distributed system for exchanging messages between data producers and consumers.

• Consumer is a data source application. It connects to an Apache Kafka^® cluster and writes messages with data to specific topics and their partitions. To be able to write messages in a topic and partition, the application must have a user account with the appropriate set of permissions.
• Consumer is an application that receives and processes data from producers. Instead of getting data directly from a producer, it connects to the Apache Kafka^® cluster, subscribes to certain topics, and reads messages from them. To be able to subscribe to a topic, the application must have a user account with the appropriate set of permissions.

For more information, see the Apache Kafka^® documentation for producers and consumers.