Apache Kafka Core Concepts

In this article, we will discuss important Apache Kafka core concepts or terminologies.

We will discuss following Apache Kafka core concepts:

1. Kafka Cluster
2. Kafka Broker
3. Kafka Producer
4. Kafka Consumer
5. Kafka Topic
6. Kafka Partitions
7. Kafka Offsets
8. Kafka Consumer Group

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Let's begin with Kafka cluster.

1. Kafka Cluster

Since Kafka is a distributed system, it acts as a cluster. A Kafka cluster consists of a set of brokers. A cluster has a minimum of 3 brokers.

The following diagram shows Kafka cluster with three Kafka brockers:

2. Kafka Broker

The broker is the Kafka server. It's just a meaningful name given to the Kafka server. And this name makes sense as well because all that Kafka does is act as a message broker between producer and consumer. 

The producer and consumer don't interact directly. They use the Kafka server as an agent or a broker to exchange messages.

The following diagram shows a Kafka broker, it acts as an agent or broker to exchange messages between Producer and Consumer:

3. Kafka Producer

Producer is an application that sends messages. It does not send messages directly to the recipient. It sends messages only to the Kafka server.

The following diagram shows Producer sends messages to directly to Kafka broker:

4. Kafka Consumer

Consumer is an application that reads messages from the Kafka server.

If producers are sending data, they must be sending it to someone, right? The consumers are the recipients. But remember that the producers don't send data to a recipient address. They just send it to the Kafka server. 

Anyone who is interested in that data can come forward and take it from the Kafka server. So, any application that requests data from a Kafka server is a consumer, and they can ask for data sent by any producer provided they have permission to read it.

The following diagram shows Producer sends messages directly to the Kafka broker and the Consumer consumes or reads messages from the Kafka broker:

5. Kafka Topic

We learned that producer sends data to the Kafka broker. Then a consumer can ask for data from the Kafka broker. But the question is, Which data? We need to have some identification mechanism to request data from a broker. There comes the Kafka topic.

• Topic is like a table in a database or folder in a file system. 
• Topic is identified by a name. 
• You can have any number of topics.

The following diagram shows two Topics are created in a Kafka broker:

6. Kafka Partitions

Kafka topics are divided into a number of partitions, which contain records in an unchangeable sequence.

Kafka Brokers will store messages for a topic. But the capacity of data can be enormous and it may not be possible to store in a single computer. Therefore it will be partitioned into multiple parts and distributed among multiple computers since Kafka is a distributed system.

The following diagram shows Kafka's topic is further divided into a number of partitions:

7. Kafka Offsets

Offset is a sequence of ids given to messages as they arrive at a partition. Once the offset is assigned it will never be changed. The first message gets an offset zero. The next message receives an offset one and so on.

8. Kafka Consumer Group

A consumer group contains one or more consumers working together to process the messages.

Conclusion

In this quick article, we have briefly discussed the following Apache Kafka core concepts:

1. Kafka Cluster
2. Kafka Broker
3. Kafka Producer
4. Kafka Consumer
5. Kafka Topic
6. Kafka Partitions
7. Kafka Offsets
8. Kafka Consumer Group

Related Tutorials

• Spring Boot Kafka JsonSerializer and JsonDeserializer Example
• Spring Boot Kafka Producer and Consumer Example Tutorial