Apache Kafka Overview

1. Introduction

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform capable of handling trillions of events a day. It is designed for high throughput, low latency, and fault tolerance.

2. Key Concepts

• Producer: An application that sends messages to a Kafka topic.
• Consumer: An application that reads messages from a Kafka topic.
• Topic: A category or feed name to which messages are published.
• Partition: A topic can have multiple partitions for scalability and parallelism.
• Broker: A Kafka server that stores and serves messages.

3. Architecture

Kafka's architecture is based on a distributed system of brokers, producers, and consumers. Each topic is split into partitions, which can be hosted on different brokers. This architecture allows for horizontal scalability and fault tolerance.

graph TD;
    A[Producers] -->|Send Messages| B[Kafka Brokers];
    B -->|Store Messages| C[Topics & Partitions];
    C -->|Consume Messages| D[Consumers];
        

4. Installation and Setup

1. Download Apache Kafka from the official website.
2. Extract the downloaded file and navigate to the Kafka directory.
3. Start the Zookeeper service:

   bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties

4. Start the Kafka server:

   bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server.properties

5. Basic Usage

Producing Messages

bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --topic my-topic --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

Consuming Messages

bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --topic my-topic --from-beginning --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

6. Best Practices

• Use multiple partitions for high throughput.
• Monitor your Kafka cluster for performance and health.
• Implement data retention policies to manage disk usage.
• Consider using a schema registry for data schema management.

7. FAQ