# Kafka Asynchronous Guidelines There are several technologies to implement event-driven architectures, but this section is going to focus on the predominant technology on this subject: Apache Kafka. **Apache Kafka** can be considered as a Streaming Platform which relies on the several concepts: * Super high-performance, scalable, highly-available cluster of brokers * Availability * Replication of partitions across different brokers * Scalability * Partitions * Ability to re-balance partitions across consumers automatically when adding/removing them * Performance * Partitioned, re-playable log (collection of messages appended sequentially to a file) * Data copied directly from disk buffer to network buffer (zero copy) without even being imported to the JVM * Extreme throughput by using the concept of consumer group * Security * Secure encrypted connections using TLS client certificates * Multi-tenant management through quotas/ACLs * Client APIs on different programming languages : Go, Scala, Python, REST, JAVA, ... * Stream processing APIs like Kafka Streams * Ecosystem of connectors to pull/push data from/to Kafka * Clean-up processes for storage optimization * Retention periods * Compacted topics --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://adidas.gitbook.io/api-guidelines/asynchronous-api-guidelines/kafka-asynchronous-guidelines.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.