What do you know about the main entities of Kafka?

Main entities of Apache Kafka:

• Topic — a logical category or stream of messages. All messages are published to topics.

• Partition — a topic is divided into multiple partitions for scalability and parallel processing.

• Producer — a component that publishes messages to topics.

• Consumer — a component that reads messages from topics.

• Consumer Group — a group of consumers that jointly read data from a topic, ensuring load balancing.

• Broker — a Kafka server that stores data and handles requests.

• Offset — a unique identifier of a message's position in a partition, used to track read messages.

• ZooKeeper (in older versions) — a service for coordinating brokers and managing metadata (gradually replaced by Kafka's own mechanism in newer versions).

These entities ensure high performance, scalability, and fault tolerance of Kafka as a messaging system.