# Apache Kafka **Entity class:** Distributed event-streaming platform **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Apache Kafka** is an open-source distributed platform for publishing, retaining, and consuming ordered event streams. It can serve as an ingestion and transport layer for security telemetry and other continuously arriving records; it does not itself determine intelligence meaning. ## Relationships - **supports:** [[wiki/Complex Event Processing|Complex Event Processing]] and [[wiki/Real-Time Observability|Real-Time Observability]]. - **paired with:** [[wiki/Apache Flink|Apache Flink]], [[wiki/ksqlDB|ksqlDB]], and graph databases. - **counterterrorism context:** streaming data into [[wiki/Graph Analytics|Graph Analytics]]. ## Sources / Provenance - [Apache Software Foundation — Kafka documentation](https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/) - [[research/A Network-Epidemiological Analysis of Radicalization and Real-Time Counterterrorism Observability|Network-Epidemiological Analysis]]