Introducing Kafka the Distributed Messaging Platform

In this chapter, we will introduce Kafka, a widely adopted scalable, performant, and distributed messaging platform. We will touch-base on different Kafka components and how they work in coherence to achieve reliable message delivery. You should see this chapter as a foundation chapter on Kafka that will help you establish familiarity with the systems involved. This chapter will help you better grasp the next chapters, which cover various Kafka components in detail. At the end of this chapter, you will have a clear understanding of Kafka's architecture and fundamental components of the Kafka messaging system.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Kafka origins
• Kafka's architecture
• Message topics
• Message partitions
• Replication and replicated logs
• Message producers
• Message consumers
• Role of Zookeeper