Apache Kafka is a high-throughput, high-availability, and scalable solution chosen by the world’s top companies for uses such as event streaming, stream processing, log aggregation, and more. Kafka runs on the platform of your choice, such as Kubernetes or ECS, as a cluster of one or more Kafka nodes. A Kafka cluster will be initialized with zero or more topics, which you can think of as message channels or queues. Clients can connect to Kafka to publish messages to topics or to consume messages from topics to the client is subscribed.

Docker is an application that uses virtualization to run containerized applications on a host machine. Containerization enables users to build, run, and test applications completely separately while still allowing them to communicate across a network. Importantly, containerization enables application portability so that the same application can be run on your local machine, a Kubernetes cluster, AWS, and more.