Liftbridge Overview
Liftbridge is a server that implements a durable, replicated, and scalable message log. The vision for Liftbridge is to provide a "Kafka-lite" solution designed with the Go community first in mind. Unlike Kafka, which is built on the JVM and whose canonical client library is Java (or the C-based librdkafka), Liftbridge and its canonical client, go-liftbridge, are implemented in Go. The ultimate goal of Liftbridge is to provide a lightweight message-streaming solution with a focus on simplicity and usability.
To this end, Liftbridge was designed to bridge the gap between sophisticated but complex log-based messaging systems like Apache Kafka and Apache Pulsar and simpler, cloud-native solutions. There is no ZooKeeper or other unwieldy dependencies, no JVM, no complicated API or configuration, and client libraries are implemented using gRPC.
Liftbridge is implemented on top of NATS, a lightweight, high-performance pub/sub messaging system. This means it can be added to an existing NATS deployment to provide message durability with no code changes. If you are not already using NATS or not familiar with it, Liftbridge can be deployed with NATS as an implementation detail.
Streams in Liftbridge are partitioned for horizontal scalability. By default, streams have a single partition. Each partition has a leader and is replicated to some set of followers for fault-tolerance. Consumer groups provide means for implementing distributed, scalable, and fault-tolerant stream processing with consumer balancing, consumer position tracking, automatic consumer failover.