Pipeline - a pipeline receives records from one or multiple source
connectors, pushes them through zero or multiple processors until they reach
one or multiple destination connectors.
Connector - a connector is the internal entity that communicates with a
connector plugin and either pushes records from the plugin into the pipeline
(source connector) or the other way around (destination connector).
Connector plugin - sometimes also referred to as "plugin", is an external
process which communicates with Conduit and knows how to read/write records
from/to a data source/destination (e.g. a database).
Processor - a component that executes an operation on a single record that
flows through the pipeline. It can either change the record or filter it out
based on some criteria.
Record - a record represents a single piece of data that flows through a
pipeline (e.g. one database row).
Collection - a generic term used in Conduit to describe an entity in a
3rd party system from which records are read from or to which records they are
written to. Examples are: topics (in Kafka), tables (in a database), indexes (
in a search engine), collections (in NoSQL databases), etc.