Kafka Fundamentals
What Kafka is, why it exists, and the core vocabulary every engineer must know.
Want the full deep-dive?Diagrams, a video, and an interactive simulation — read the Kafka 101 guide.0 of 6 lessons complete
- 1What is Apache Kafka?Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform: it is built for high throughput, fault tolerance and durable storage of…
- 2The Fallacies of Distributed SystemsThe eight fallacies of distributed computing are a classic checklist of assumptions that go wrong in distributed systems…
- 3Topics, Partitions & OffsetsA topic is a named category of events that producers write to and consumers read from. Topics are split into partitions:…
- 4Brokers & ClustersA Kafka broker is a server that stores partitions and serves producers and consumers, and a cluster is a group of broker…
- 5Replication Factor & DurabilityThe replication factor (RF) is how many servers replicate each message: with RF=3 every partition is stored on three bro…
- 6Producers & ConsumersProducers write records to topics. With a key, the partition is chosen from a hash of the key; without one, the default …
Knowledge check
Q1.What happens to messages after a consumer reads them in Kafka?
Q2.What does min.insync.replicas=2 with acks=all mean for a write?
Q3.Which guarantee does Kafka provide regarding message ordering?
Q4.What does a replication factor of 3 mean?