What is Camus?
Camus is an open-source software designed for working with Apache Kafka. It functions as a Kafka message collector, aggregator, and forwarder that can process messages from Kafka topics and make the data available to other systems for analytics and reporting.
Some key features of Camus include:
- Real-time or near real-time Kafka message processing - As messages arrive in Kafka topics, Camus can immediately process them to extract data and move it downstream.
- Aggregation of messages - Camus can aggregate messages based on time windows or partition sizes before forwarding the data.
- Support for different data store destinations - After processing Kafka messages, Camus can send the data to HDFS, Amazon S3, Elasticsearch, or other common data stores.
- Fault tolerance - Camus uses Kafka consumer group functionality for fault tolerance and manages check-pointing to resume work after any failures.
- Easy monitoring - Camus metrics can be published to Kafka or HTTP for monitoring with tools like Graphite.
Overall, Camus plays an important role as a way to unlock Kafka data and make it available for real-time and historical analysis using downstream analytic systems and data stores. Typical use cases include powering real-time dashboards, generating hourly reports, loading data into search platforms, and building datasets for data science workloads.