Apache Kafka for Beginners — Learn Kafka by Hands-On
“An ounce of practice is better than tons of theory” — Vishnudevananda Saraswati
To better understand a new technology there is nothing more effective than trying it hands-on. Doing things on your own helps create that link between theory and practice. Learning by doing is the preferred way of many successful engineers and we are going to take a similar approach when learning Apache Kafka.
We have already discussed the minimum basics of Apache Kafka that are required for us to begin using it. If you are unaware of terminologies such as Producers, Consumers, Events, and Topics, I would suggest giving this article a look.
From here on I will assume that all the readers are equipped with knowledge of basic terminologies. But we need to understand one more definition before we can actually begin using Kafka.
ZooKeeper
The ZooKeeper is an important part of the Kafka ecosystem. It is responsible for maintaining critical metadata such as cluster information and details of consumer clients. It keeps track of brokers and partitions. It is responsible for managing brokers and topics. It…