Kafka Connect is a framework built on top of Kafka for reliably streaming data between Kafka and external systems such as databases, file systems, and cloud services, without writing custom producer/consumer code.
Key Points: • Source connectors pull data from external systems into Kafka topics; sink connectors push data from Kafka topics into external systems. • Connectors are configuration-driven, so integrating a new data source is usually a matter of writing a JSON or properties config, not new code. • Connect runs in distributed mode for scalability and fault tolerance, automatically rebalancing tasks across workers. • It handles offset tracking, retries, and schema conversion, reducing the amount of boilerplate integration code teams need to maintain.
Example: A team can use the Debezium MySQL source connector to stream row-level database changes into a Kafka topic in near real time, then use a sink connector to load that same data into Elasticsearch for search, without writing any custom integration code.
Interview Tip: A concise interview answer is:
"Kafka Connect is a framework for moving data in and out of Kafka using pre-built or custom connectors, and it's useful because it turns integrations with databases or other systems into configuration rather than custom producer/consumer code, while also handling scaling, offsets, and fault tolerance for you."