Through what were integrations with external systems implemented? Conceptually, how does Kafka work?

Integrations with external systems are often implemented through message exchange, REST API, RPC, or message brokers such as Apache Kafka.

Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that functions as a high-performance message broker.

Key concepts of Kafka:

• Topics: Channels where messages are published.
• Producers: Applications that send messages to topics.
• Consumers: Applications that read messages from topics.
• Brokers: Servers that store and forward messages.
• Partitions: Topics are divided into partitions for scalability and parallelism.

Kafka guarantees high throughput, fault tolerance, and the ability to process large streams of data in real-time.

Conceptually, when a system publishes an event, it is recorded in a Kafka topic. Other systems subscribed to this topic receive these events and process them asynchronously, enabling the construction of reliable and scalable integrations.