What is the main purpose of the Kafka Streams component in data processing architecture?

Kafka Streams is a library for real-time data stream processing embedded within the Apache Kafka ecosystem. The main purpose of the component is to create applications and microservices that receive, process, and output data as streams.

Kafka Streams allows:

• Transforming, filtering, and aggregating data in streams
• Processing events with low latency
• Maintaining processing state (stateful processing)
• Scaling processing through load distribution

Example: an application that reads a stream of orders, filters only successful ones, aggregates them over time, and writes the results to another Kafka topic for further analysis.