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Kafka Is Fun

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.
  1. 1What is Apache Kafka?Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform built for high-throughput, fault-tolerant, durable publish-subscribe mes…
  2. 2The Fallacies of Distributed SystemsBefore you can appreciate why Kafka is built the way it is, it helps to know the eight assumptions that engineers new to…
  3. 3Topics, Partitions & OffsetsA topic is a named category of events. Topics are split into partitions — each partition is an ordered, append-only log.…
  4. 4Brokers & ClustersA Kafka broker is a server that stores partitions and serves producers/consumers. A cluster is a group of brokers. Each …
  5. 5Replication Factor & DurabilityReplication factor (RF) controls how many copies of each partition exist across brokers. RF=3 means every message is sto…
  6. 6Producers & 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?

Q4.Which fallacy of distributed systems does Kafka's replication + ISR model directly address?