Apache Kafka 101 With Java (Spring Boot) For Beginners

What is Kafka

Kafka is a Publish/Subscribe messaging system. It allows producers to write records into Kafka that can be read by one or more consumers. These records that cannot be deleted or modified once they are sent to Kafka.

Producers

The first component of Kafka is Producers. Producers create messages and send them to topics. The data or we can say that records are published to the topics by the producers. They can also assign the partition when it is publishing data to the topic. The producer can send data in a round robin way or it can implement a priority system based on sending records to certain partitions based on the priority of the record.

Kafka Cluster

Kafka uses a distributed clustering system. If you have any background in distributed systems, you already know that a Cluster is a group of computers acting together for a common purpose. Since Kafka is a distributed system, the cluster has the same meaning for Kafka. It is merely a group of computers, each executing one instance of Kafka broker.

Kafka Broker

KAfka clusters are occurred from brokers. The broker is Kafka server. It is just a meaningful name given to Kafka server. And this title makes sense as well because all that Kafka does; is act as a message broker between producer and consumer. The producer and consumer do not interact directly. They use Kafka server as an agent or a broker to exchange messages.