Kafka Connect source and sink connectors are plugins that allow developers to easily integrate Kafka with external systems, making it possible to read data from external systems and publish it to Kafka (source connectors), or to read data from Kafka and write it to external systems (sink connectors).
Source connectors are used to collect data from external systems and publish it to Kafka topics. Source connectors can be used to collect data from a wide range of sources, such as databases, message queues, and log files. Source connectors can be configured to read data incrementally, allowing them to efficiently collect changes since the last read and minimize the amount of data transmitted to Kafka.
Sink connectors are used to write data from Kafka to external systems. Sink connectors can be used to write data to a wide range of destinations, such as databases, search engines, and file systems. Sink connectors can be configured to write data in a variety of formats, such as delimited files, JSON, or Avro.
Both source and sink connectors are designed to be highly scalable and fault-tolerant. Connectors can be distributed across multiple nodes in a cluster, allowing for parallel processing of data. Connectors can also be configured to retry failed operations and to resume processing from the point of failure, ensuring that data is not lost in the event of hardware or software failures.
Kafka Connect provides a number of pre-built connectors for common data sources and destinations, such as JDBC databases, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, and S3. Additionally, Kafka Connect provides a framework and set of APIs for developing custom connectors, allowing developers to easily integrate Kafka with any external system.