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# Kafka Features

Kafka is an open-source distributed event and stream-processing platform built to process demanding real-time data feeds. It is inherently scalable, with high throughput and availability.

- **Automatic updates**. You can select a weekly date and time during which the database checks and applies updates to its operating system and engine to keep the service stable and secure.
- **End-to-end security**. Encrypts data at rest with LUKS and in transit with SSL.
- **Cluster metrics and alerting**. Cluster metrics visualizations help you monitor the performance of the nodes in a database cluster, like resource usage, to guide capacity planning and optimization. Alert policies notify you when a metric rises above or falls below a threshold you set, like high CPU or low memory.