Kafka Taxonomy

• Broker: Brokers creates Kafka cluster by sharing information using Zookeeper. A broker receives messages from producers and consumers fetch messages from the broker by topic, partition, and offset.

• Cluster: Kafka is a distributed system. A Kafka cluster contains multiple brokers sharing the workload.

• Producer: A producer is a client that sends messages to the Kafka server to the desired topic.

• Consumer: Consumers are the recipients who receive messages from the Kafka server.

• Topic: A topic is a category name to which messages are published and from which consumers can receive messages.

• Partition: Messages published to a topic are spread across a Kafka cluster into several partitions. Each partition can be associated with a broker to allow consumers to read from a topic in parallel.

• Offset: Offset is a pointer to the last message that Kafka has already sent to a consumer.