By skyforbes 
Back in 2010, LinkedIn had a problem. Their website was drowning in data from user activity, system logs, and operational metrics. Traditional messaging systems couldn’t handle the scale they needed. So three engineers, Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede, and Jun Rao, built something entirely new: Apache Kafka.
They designed Kafka to handle LinkedIn’s serious business problems: processing massive amounts of professional networking data, tracking user connections, and analyzing career patterns. What they couldn’t have predicted was that thirteen years later, their creation would become the backbone for delivering dancing videos and cat memes to over 1 billion TikTok users worldwide.
This is the story of how enterprise software built for spreadsheets ended up powering the most addictive app on the planet.
When Big Data Actually Meant Big Data
Apache Kafka wasn’t born from some Silicon Valley startup trying to disrupt social media. It came from LinkedIn’s very practical need to handle their exploding data volumes. By 2011, when LinkedIn open-sourced Kafka, they were already processing over…