Part 1 Exploring Kafka building blocks
Kafka’s architecture is the outcome of intentional design decisions that balance scalability, reliability, and simplicity. In this part of the book, we’ll uncover how Kafka really works and why those choices matter for architects.
In chapter 1, we’ll discuss Kafka from a high-level architectural perspective, looking at its design principles, ecosystem components, and how it shapes enterprise architecture. Chapter 2 dives into the internals of the Kafka cluster, examining its structure and the role of topics and partitions and showing how configuration settings influence system behavior. We’ll then turn to Kafka clients: chapter 3 explores producers, with strategies for partitioning, acknowledgments, and batching, while chapter 4 focuses on consumers, highlighting how they subscribe, manage offsets, and rebalance to ensure reliable processing at scale.