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Kafka Streams is a core part of the open-source Apache Kafka project.

You may be mistaking it for kSQL, or ksqlDB as they call it now, which is a Confluent project built on top of Kafka Streams.

Be that as it may, I agree with the spirit of the grand-parent comment, which is that if you stick to straightforward Pub/Sub Kafka works great.

It is, but it's ancillary to Kafka the distributed log.