Comprehensive Introduction to Apache Kafka: Concepts, Architecture, Installation, and Usage

Kafka Overview

Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that provides publish/subscribe messaging, fault‑tolerant storage, and real‑time stream processing capabilities.

Core Concepts

Publish and Subscribe – messages are written to and read from topics.

Durable Storage – records are persisted in an append‑only log.

Stream Processing – consumers can process records as they arrive.

Key Terminology

Topic : a logical category of records, possibly spanning multiple partitions.

Partition : an ordered, immutable sequence of records stored as a log file.

Broker : a server that hosts partitions and serves client requests.

Leader / Follower : each partition has one leader handling reads/writes; followers replicate the leader.

Core APIs

Producer API : publish records to topics.

Consumer API : subscribe to topics and read records.

Streams API : build stream processing applications.

Connector API : integrate Kafka with external systems (e.g., databases).

Installation

Download the desired version from kafka.apache.org and extract it.

[root@along ~]# wget http://mirrors.shu.edu.cn/apache/kafka/2.1.0/kafka_2.11-2.1.0.tgz
[root@along ~]# tar -C /data/ -xvf kafka_2.11-2.1.0.tgz
[root@along ~]# cd /data/kafka_2.11-2.1.0/

Zookeeper Configuration

Kafka requires Zookeeper for cluster coordination.

[root@along ~]# yum -y install java-1.8.0

Modify config/zookeeper.properties as needed (e.g., dataDir, clientPort).

Kafka Broker Configuration

Edit config/server.properties to set broker ID, listeners, log directories, and Zookeeper connection.

broker.id=0
listeners=PLAINTEXT://localhost:9092
log.dirs=/tmp/kafka-logs
zookeeper.connect=localhost:2181

Starting Services

Start Zookeeper and then Kafka:

# nohup zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties &
# service kafka start

Basic Operations

Create a topic: # kafka-topics.sh --create --zookeeper localhost:2181 --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1 --topic along

Send messages with the console producer: # kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list localhost:9092 --topic along > This is a message

Consume messages with the console consumer: # kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --topic along --from-beginning

Multi‑Broker Cluster

Copy server.properties to create server-1.properties and server-2.properties , change broker.id , listeners , and log.dirs , then start each broker.

# nohup kafka-server-start.sh config/server-1.properties &
# nohup kafka-server-start.sh config/server-2.properties &

Verify the cluster with kafka-topics.sh --describe and test fault tolerance by killing a broker; the leader will automatically move to another replica.

Kafka Connect

Kafka Connect enables importing/exporting data without custom code. Run in standalone mode with configuration files:

# connect-standalone.sh config/connect-standalone.properties config/connect-file-source.properties config/connect-file-sink.properties

Example: source connector reads lines from test.txt into topic connect-test ; sink connector writes the topic back to test.sink.txt .

# echo -e "foo\nbar" > test.txt
# cat test.sink.txt
foo
bar

Consume the topic directly to see the JSON payloads.

# kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --topic connect-test --from-beginning
{"schema":{"type":"string","optional":false},"payload":"foo"}
{"schema":{"type":"string","optional":false},"payload":"bar"}

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