Apache Kafka vs Google Cloud Spanner

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. Originally developed at LinkedIn, it provides high-throughput, fault-tolerant publish-subscribe messaging with persistent storage. Kafka supports stream processing through Kafka Streams and ksqlDB.

Cloud Spanner is Google's horizontally scalable relational database service that combines the benefits of traditional SQL databases with the scalability of NoSQL systems. It provides strong consistency and global distribution for mission-critical applications.