📨 Apache Kafka

Topics, partitions and offsets, producers, consumer groups, replication, delivery guarantees, and when to choose Kafka over RabbitMQ.

7 lessons · about 0.5 hours

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  1. 01What Is Apache Kafka? Kafka is a distributed, durable log of events that many systems can write to and read from at huge scale. The big picture, the vocabulary, and why so many companies use it.Beginner4 min read
  2. 02Topics, Partitions & Offsets How Kafka organises data. Why topics are split into partitions, how message keys decide the partition and keep ordering, how offsets work, and how retention and compaction clean up.Beginner5 min read
  3. 03Kafka Producers How producers send records: batching, compression, partitioning, the acks setting that trades speed for safety, retries, and the idempotent producer.Intermediate5 min read
  4. 04Consumers & Consumer Groups How consumers read in parallel with consumer groups, how partitions are assigned and rebalanced, how offsets are committed, and how to handle lag, errors and retries.Intermediate5 min read
  5. 05Brokers, Replication & Durability How Kafka survives server failures. Brokers, leaders and followers, in-sync replicas, min.insync.replicas, leader election and KRaft, drawn step by step.Intermediate4 min read
  6. 06Delivery Guarantees: At-Most, At-Least & Exactly Once Can a message be lost? Delivered twice? Learn Kafka's three delivery semantics, idempotent producers, transactions for read-process-write, and why idempotent consumers still matter.Advanced4 min read
  7. 07Kafka vs RabbitMQ & the Kafka Ecosystem When to choose Kafka and when a traditional broker like RabbitMQ fits better, plus a tour of Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry and real-world architectures.Intermediate5 min read