Conceptually, I get the difference. As per Kafka docs:
[...] a topic is similar to a folder in a filesystem, and the events are the files in that folder. An example topic name could be "payments". Topics in Kafka are always multi-producer and multi-subscriber: a topic can have zero, one, or many producers that write events to it, as well as zero, one, or many consumers that subscribe to these events.
And channels are not Kafka specific but used amongst many streaming services (e.g. RabbitMQ). Also, Kafka topics can be mapped to channels by Java frameworks like Spring, Quarkus, etc. Furthermore, I see channels being used with Kafka Streams.
These two answers (ref1 and ref2) give a theoretical explanation, but I'm looking for something with a use case.
In the context of Apache Kafka, would it be fair to assume that a Kafka channel is a further abstraction of a Kafka topic?
I'd like to learn in a practical engineering sense what the difference is between Kafka Topics & Channels. Thank you!
