Understanding Kafka: Core Architecture, Storage, and Reliability Explained
This article provides a comprehensive overview of Kafka, covering its overall structure, key components such as brokers, producers, consumers, topics, partitions, replicas, leader‑follower mechanics, logical and physical storage models, producer and consumer workflows, configuration parameters, partition assignment strategies, rebalancing, log retention and compaction, indexing, zero‑copy transmission, and the reliability concepts that ensure data durability.