I’ve recently been playing around with the ELK stack (now officially known as the Elastic stack) collecting data from an IRC channel with Elastic’s Logstash, storing it in Elasticsearch and analysing it with Kibana. But, this isn’t an “ELK” post - this is a Kafka post! ELK is just some example data manipulation tooling that helps demonstrate the principles. As I wrote about last year, Apache Kafka provides a handy way to build flexible “pipelines”.