Five types of workloads and each corresponds to a specific API.

Kafka Producer API:

Applications directly producing data (ex: clickstream, logs, IoT).

Kafka Connect Source API:

Applications bridging between a datastore, which we don’t control, and Kafka (ex: Postgres, MongoDB, Twitter, REST API).

Kafka Streams API:

Applications wanting to consume from Kafka and produce back into Kafka, also called stream processing. We can use this when it is required to write complex logic for the job.

Kafka Consumer API:

Read a stream and perform real-time actions on it (e.g., send email…)

Kafka Connect Sink API:

Read a stream and store it into a target store (ex: Kafka to S3, Kafka to HDFS, Kafka to MongoDB, etc.)