5 docs tagged with "core"

Producers ──► [ Broker Cluster ] ──► Consumers │ │ │ B1 B2 B3 │ ZooKeeper / KRaft

A **topic** is a named, durable stream of messages in Kafka. Think of it as a logical category or feed where producers write and consumers read.

A **partition** is an ordered, immutable sequence of records (a log) within a topic. Each partition lives on exactly one broker at a time (as leader) and.

The **replication factor** defines how many copies of each partition exist across the cluster.

Partitions are the unit of parallelism in Kafka. Scaling them is critical for throughput but can break ordering for keyed topics. This guide covers the mechanics, risks, and migration strategies.