Kafka 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Kafka

Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform used for building real-time data pipelines and applications. It was developed to handle high throughput, scalability, and durability needs, making it popular in industries such as finance, retail, and telecom. Kafka operates on key concepts like topics, partitions, producers, consumers, brokers, offsets, and consumer groups, which together provide a robust system for event-driven architectures and stream processing. Recent developments include the transition from ZooKeeper to KRaft for improved scalability and simplified operations. Kafka supports delivery semantics like At-Most-Once, At-Least-Once, and Exactly-Once, ensuring reliable message delivery across various use cases.