Apache Kafka providers

You can integrate with the Apache Kafka messaging platform to publish and consume messages asynchronously from the Kafka platform. Kafka can be configured as an external message provider that accepts and stores outbound and inbound messages.

The product provides the Kafka messaging client that supports consuming, producing, and browsing Kafka topics. To use Kafka features in the product, you must obtain and configure a Kafka server instance of the provider. You can choose any Kafka provider that is compatible with the Kafka 1.1.1 client libraries.

The Kafka provider manages the topics and the corresponding partitions and storage that persist the integration messages. The Maximo® integration framework provides the Kafka client framework to read, write, and browse messages in Kafka topics.

The integration framework only uses messaging features of Kafka and does not use any of the Kafka streaming features. The framework uses the point-to-point delivery of Kafka messages. Thus, all Kafka topics are used by the integration framework as a messaging queue, and only one consumer group per topic is used to consume messages. Messages are not broadcast to multiple consumer groups. However, to enable browsing of topics, one other consumer group per topic is available.