Learn streaming data with Lenses

Here is a glossary with all the basics in Kafka and data streaming engineering. Want to learn more? Join our Community Slack channel.

BEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

A

  • Agentic Engineering

    A paradigm shift in software development where AI agents are orchestrated with engineering rigor to autonomously build, operate, and govern data systems under human oversight.

  • Apache Kafka

    A distributed event store and stream-processing platform used as a real-time data "central nervous system" for modern enterprises.

C

  • CIMD (Client ID Metadata Document)

    A web-based registration model for MCP clients where the identity is a URL hosting a JSON document, allowing for verified, domain-linked security.

  • Consumer Group

    A coordinated group of consumers that ingest data from topics, sharing the workload and tracking progress via offsets.

D

  • Data Lineage

    A visual representation of the data lifecycle, showing how events flow from producers through topics and processors to final sinks.

  • Data Masking

    A governance policy that obscures sensitive PII fields (like emails or phone numbers) in real-time before agents or unauthorized users see them.

K

  • Kafka Cluster

    A set of one or more Kafka brokers working together to provide scalability and fault tolerance.

  • Kafka Connector

    A pre-built component used to integrate Kafka with external systems (e.g., S3, Snowflake) to move data in (Source) or out (Sink).

  • Kafka Consumer

    An application or agent that reads and processes data from Kafka topics.