Producers are applications that “produce” streaming data. These applications may be monitoring the status of a system, collecting sensor data, watching traffic to a website, or otherwise observing events in some way. Producers may be general-purpose tools such as the Fluvio CLI, or they may be special-purpose programs built to meet a specific need, in which case the producer program would leverage one of the programmatic APIs.

Consumers are applications that “consume” records from a particular topic and partition^[1]. Typically, a consumer will perform actions based on the events it receives, such as sending a notification or updating a database. There may be many consumers reading data from a particular partition at any given time: since the records are persisted, they do not expire after being consumed.