Kafka in Action

2 Getting to know Kafka

This chapters covers

• The high-level architecture of Kafka
• Understanding client options
• How applications communicate with a broker
• Producing and consuming your first message
• Using Kafka clients with a Java application

Now that we have a high-level view of where Kafka shines and why one would use it, let’s dive into the Kafka components that make up the whole system. Apache Kafka is a distributed system at heart, but it is also possible to install and run it on a single host. That gives us a starting point to dive into our sample use cases. As is often the case, the real questions start flowing once the hands hit the keyboard. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to send and retrieve your first Kafka message from ...