Traditional message brokers are designed to deliver messages from one application to another. They provide a point-to-point communication pattern, where each message is sent to a single consumer.
Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that provides a publish-subscribe messaging system. It provides a distributed, partitioned, and replicated log service, which is used to store and process streams of data records. Kafka is designed to scale out horizontally and handle large volumes of data in real-time. It is highly available and fault-tolerant, allowing for message delivery even when some of the nodes fail.
For example, a traditional message broker might be used to send a message from a web application to a mobile application. The web application would send the message to the broker, which would then deliver it to the mobile application.
With Apache Kafka, the web application would publish the message to a Kafka topic. The mobile application would then subscribe to that topic and receive the message. The message would be replicated across multiple Kafka nodes, providing fault tolerance and scalability.