Apache Kafka Tutorial

1. Kafka Introduction

Run Kafka locally with Docker Compose in KRaft mode and create your first topic from the CLI.

2. Topics, Partitions & Offsets

How partitioning enables parallelism, consumer groups and offset tracking, and why ordering is per-partition only.

3. Producers & Consumers

Complete Java KafkaProducer and KafkaConsumer examples, acks configuration, and manual vs auto commit.

4. Exactly-Once Semantics

Idempotent producers, transactional read-process-write, and why "exactly once" really means "effectively once".

5. Schema Registry and Avro

Why long-lived topics need a schema contract, how the Schema Registry works, and Avro compatibility rules.

6. Kafka Streams & Connect

Stream processing with Kafka Streams and integrating external systems declaratively with Kafka Connect.

7. Monitoring and Operations

Consumer lag, key broker and consumer metrics to alert on, and common operational issues and their causes.

8. Kafka in Production: Reference Architecture

A real production reference architecture: replication factor choices, partition count planning, and multi-datacenter replication.

9. Kafka Interview Questions

Practical Kafka interview questions on partition ordering, rebalancing, delivery guarantees, and acks trade-offs.