Can kafka be used to receive data from third party applications?

Question

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There is a task with obtaining data from third-party applications. This used to be IBM's MQ, but customers want to move away from MQSeries. They heard about kafka and now they are thinking to use it to receive / transmit data.

So far, the project has used kafka to communicate within the application. Between separate microservices. Now it turns out it will be necessary to hang the kafka outside. It is necessary to somehow make a secure connection, to configure access to certain topics. Before that, there was nothing like this. Everyone had equal access.

So the question is, is it worth it? Is kafka used to communicate between different applications?

Thanks

Answer 1

Is kafka used to communicate between different applications?

So MQ and Kafka are direct competitors, it is naturally used.
And is it worth it - do a test.