The Ultimate Kafka 101 You Cannot Miss

Kafka is super-popular but can be overwhelming in the beginning.

Here are 8 simple steps that can help you understand the fundamentals of Kafka.

What is Kafka?

Kafka is a distributed event store and a streaming platform. It began as an internal project at LinkedIn and now powers some of the largest data pipelines in the world in orgs like Netflix, Uber, etc.

Kafka Messages

Message is the basic unit of data in Kafka. It’s like a record in a table consisting of headers, key, and value.

Kafka Topics and Partitions

Every message goes to a particular Topic. Think of the topic as a folder on your computer. Topics also have multiple partitions.

Advantages of Kafka

Kafka can handle multiple producers and consumers, while providing disk-based data retention and high scalability.

Kafka Producer

Producers in Kafka create new messages, batch them, and send them to a Kafka topic. They also take care of balancing messages across different partitions.

Kafka Consumer

Kafka consumers work together as a consumer group to read messages from the broker.

Kafka Cluster

A Kafka cluster consists of several brokers where each partition is replicated across multiple brokers to ensure high availability and redundancy.

Use Cases of Kafka

Kafka can be used for log analysis, data streaming, change data capture, and system monitoring.