What is Kafka Connect?

Kafka Connect is a framework for reliably streaming data between Kafka and other systems (databases, files, cloud services) using pre-built connectors. Source connectors pull data FROM external systems INTO Kafka. Sink connectors push data FROM Kafka INTO external systems. It runs as a distributed or standalone cluster. Popular connectors: JDBC (databases), Debezium (CDC), S3, Elasticsearch, MongoDB. Connectors handle serialization, parallelism, fault tolerance, and offset tracking automatically.

Expected key concepts: framework, connectors, source connector, sink connector, distributed, Debezium, CDC, JDBC, S3, fault tolerance, offset tracking