In this chapter, we learned about the basics of Apache Kafka and how to use it as part of a real-time stream processing pipeline build with Storm. We learned about the architecture of Apache Kafka and how it can be integrated into Storm processing by using KafkaSpout.

In the next chapter, we will have a look at Trident, which is a high-level abstraction for defining Storm topologies. We will also see transactional topologies in Storm that support exactly-once message processing semantics.