Kafka in Action

6 Brokers

This chapters covers

• The role of brokers and their duties
• Evaluating options for certain broker configuration values
• Explaining replicas and how they stay up to date

So far in our discussions, we have dealt with Kafka from the view of an application developer interacting from external applications and processes. However, Kafka is a distributed system that deserves attention in its own right. In this chapter, let’s look at the parts that make the Kafka brokers work.

6.1 Introducing the broker

Although we have focused on the client side of Kafka so far, our focus will now shift to another powerful component of the ecosystem: brokers. Brokers work together with other brokers to form the core of the system.

As we start to discover Kafka, ...