Why is a message broker (Kafka) needed? How does it fit into the architecture?

A message broker, such as Kafka, is a component that provides asynchronous message transfer between services or system components. It acts as an intermediary, receiving messages from producers and delivering them to consumers.

Why is a message broker needed:

• Decentralization and Asynchrony: allows services to operate independently and not wait for responses from each other.
• Buffering: stores messages if the consumer is temporarily unavailable.
• Scalability: supports high load and parallel processing.
• Reliability: guarantees message delivery, supports replication and fault tolerance.

In architecture, a message broker is often used for microservice integration, organizing event-driven architecture, data transfer between IoT components, and stream processing.

Kafka, in particular, stores messages in topics, supports partitioning, and allows consumers to read messages from a specific position, which is convenient for building complex data processing systems.