The Topic, the Message and the Partition

Traditional messaging patterns: message queue and publish – subscribe, have some limitations as a result of their design.

In the previous post – Apache Kafka Ideas – Part 1, a couple of messaging use cases were introduced. In order to define those cases with Kafka, it is important to understand its ideas. At the very heart of Kafka are topics and partitions. This post explains basic concepts behind them.

Continue reading “Apache Kafka Ideas – Part 2” →

What Apache Kafka is?

Apache Kafka can be thought of as a message broker. It has the following characteristics:

• allows sending messages between two parties
• allows one-to-one (peer to peer, queue) or one-to-many (broadcast, topic) message delivery
• persists messages

What ideas are behind Kafka and how does it differ from a classical broker? In this series of posts you’ll find out how does Apache Kafka work and be able to run and use Kafka cluster.

Continue reading “Apache Kafka Ideas – Part 1” →