Is message order preservation ensured when using Kafka?

In Apache Kafka, the preservation of message order is guaranteed within a single partition of a topic. This means that all messages sent to the same partition will be consumed in the order they were written.

However, if a topic has multiple partitions, the order of messages between different partitions is not guaranteed. To ensure message processing order, message keys are often used so that all related messages go to the same partition.

Thus, the sequence is maintained at the partition level, but not across the entire topic.