While working with Kafka, it’s important to understand its core features and concepts to maximize its potential. Here are some essential features to be aware of:
1. Producers and Consumers
Producers send messages to topics, while consumers read messages from those topics. Understanding the roles of both is crucial for effective messaging.
2. Topics and Partitions
Topics organize messages, and partitions allow Kafka to scale by distributing the load across multiple brokers.
3. Offset Management
Each message has a unique offset. Consumers can manage offsets to track which messages they’ve processed.
4. Replication and Fault Tolerance
Kafka replicates partitions across multiple brokers for high availability and fault tolerance.
5. Kafka Streams API
This powerful library allows for real-time data processing and transformation using Java APIs.
6. Kafka Connect
Kafka Connect facilitates the integration of Kafka with external data systems, making it easier to ingest and export data.
7. Message Durability
Kafka persists messages on disk, ensuring data durability even after processing.
8. Log Compaction
This feature allows Kafka to retain only the latest version of messages with the same key, which is useful for changelogs.
9. Transactions
Kafka supports transactions for producing messages atomically across multiple topics.
10. Security Features
Kafka offers various security features, including authentication, authorization, and encryption, ensuring secure data transport.