Producers and consumers

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

• Producer is a data source application. It connects to an Apache Kafka® cluster and writes messages with data to specific topics and topic partitions. To write messages to a topic and partition, an application user must be granted the appropriate permissions.
• Consumer is an application that receives and processes data from producers. Rather than getting data directly from a producer, it connects to the Apache Kafka® cluster, subscribes to certain topics, and reads messages from them. To subscribe to a topic, an application user must be granted the appropriate permissions.

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