What is rack awareness in Kafka and why is it important?

Rack awareness ensures partition replicas are spread across different failure domains (racks, availability zones). Configure broker.rack=az-east-1a on each broker. Kafka's rack-aware replica assignment ensures the leader and each follower are on different racks. This means a full rack/AZ failure doesn't take down all replicas. For cloud deployments: each AZ = one rack. With RF=3 and 3 AZs, you can lose an entire AZ without data loss or read unavailability. broker.rack is essential for production cloud Kafka deployments.

Expected key concepts: rack awareness, broker.rack, failure domains, availability zones, AZ, leader, follower, replica assignment, cloud, RF=3