Kafka Fundamentals
What Kafka is, why it exists, and the core vocabulary every engineer must know.
- 1What is Apache Kafka?Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform built for high-throughput, fault-tolerant, durable publish-subscribe mes…
- 2Topics, Partitions & OffsetsA topic is a named category of events. Topics are split into partitions — each partition is an ordered, append-only log.…
- 3Brokers & ClustersA Kafka broker is a server that stores partitions and serves producers/consumers. A cluster is a group of brokers. Each …
- 4Replication Factor & DurabilityReplication factor (RF) controls how many copies of each partition exist across brokers. RF=3 means every message is sto…
- 5Producers & ConsumersProducers write messages to topics. They choose which partition using a key hash (consistent) or round-robin (no key). T…
Knowledge check
Q1.What happens to messages after a consumer reads them in Kafka?
Q2.What does min.insync.replicas=2 with acks=all guarantee?
Q3.Which guarantee does Kafka provide regarding message ordering?