Junior — Middle
Can you list the main components of the Kafka system and explain their purpose?
sobes.tech AI
Answer from AI
Main components of the Kafka system and their purpose:
- Broker — Kafka server that stores data and handles requests for writing and reading messages.
- Topic — a logical category or channel where messages are published. Topics are divided into partitions for scalability.
- Partition — a part of a topic that stores a sequence of messages. Each partition is ordered and has offsets.
- Producer — a component that sends messages to Kafka topics.
- Consumer — a component that reads messages from topics.
- Consumer Group — a group of consumers that jointly read data from topics, ensuring load balancing.
- Zookeeper — a service that manages Kafka metadata, coordinates brokers, and monitors their status (in newer Kafka versions, a native mechanism without Zookeeper may be used).
Example: A producer sends events to a topic, the broker stores them in partitions, and a consumer group reads these events for processing.