In a customer-data stack, Kafka is often the pipeline that carries events from source systems to a CDP, a warehouse, and activation tools, decoupling producers from consumers so each runs at its own pace. It is infrastructure most marketers never see but rely on whenever real-time data moves at scale.

In practice

You rarely choose Kafka as a marketer, but you feel it. When data teams say events flow through Kafka, expect durability and scale, and ask the same question you would ask of any queue: how much latency it adds before an event reaches the profile a campaign reads.