Which protocol is essential to support a development team's application using Kafka for streaming?

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the correct choice for supporting a development team's application using Kafka for streaming. TCP is a connection-oriented protocol that ensures reliable transmission of data between sender and receiver, making it particularly well-suited for applications that require consistent delivery. In the context of Kafka, which is designed for high-throughput and low-latency message transmission, using TCP allows for the management of connections and the integrity of data packets, ensuring that messages are delivered in the correct order and without loss.

Kafka operates over a network and benefits from TCP's reliability features, such as error recovery and flow control. This is important because streaming applications often need to handle large volumes of data in real-time, where the loss of messages or out-of-order delivery could disrupt the application’s functionality.

In contrast, protocols like UDP, which is connectionless and does not guarantee delivery or order, would not be suitable for Kafka's use case. Similarly, while HTTP is widely used for web communication, it is not optimized for the streaming data requirements that Kafka addresses. FTP, on the other hand, is intended for file transfer and does not align with the real-time message processing needs of a Kafka-based application.