In most real world applications, we have a RESTful API service facing various client applications and a collection of backend services which process the data coming from those clients. Depending on the application, the architecture might have various services spread across multiple clusters of servers, and some form of queue or messaging service gluing them together. Today, we're going to talk about one such messaging service - Apache Kafka - and how it can improve the performance of your services. We're going to assume that we have at least two microservices, one for the APIs that are exposed to the world, and one which processes the requests coming in from the API microservice, but in an async fashion. Because this is