No, as it is more than that. Kafka is a great Event Streaming solution, but it does not deal with Commands or Queries like Axon Server nor does it take the same approach to an Event Store. Check out these two (one and two) articles for more on the subject.

The communication in Axon Server is done with gRPC, using ProtoBuf. We chose it because of its flexibility and efficiency. On top of that, it allows the construction of connection points in different programming languages. By the way, the API for it is open-source, and you can find it here.

That’s a good question, but also a long story to share. We do have a blog post explaining how to migrate from or to Axon Server, however. You can find the blog here.

Most definitely! Axon Server is a great addition next to Axon Framework, but they are not necessarily paired up. You can access the Message Routing and Event Store capabilities just as well without using Axon Framework by using the Connector.

You can, but it might require some handy work. Axon Server’s API is based on gRPC (ProtoBuf), allowing you to construct a connector in many languages. There are a couple of community connector implementations such as Rust, Go, and NodeJS that are supported by the community and not AxonIQ.

Sure you can! That would be the “Axon Server Standard” edition, to be exact. This version of Axon Servers provides you with command, event, and query distribution and an Event Store implementation.