Kafka Connect is a framework service based around connector to move data into and out of Kafka.
The service is a worker. By starting a worker, you are starting connect.
The management is done through the rest api and the connect name is often used to describe its rest api.
Connectors and tasks are logical units of work:
Runtime:
Transform:
Kafka Connect has only one hard prerequisite in order to get started: a set of Kafka brokers because it use it as a back-end database to store connector and task configurations, offsets, and status in internal Kafka topics
Connect (and therefore a worker) can be started