Kafka: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 5. Kafka Internals

It is not strictly necessary to understand Kafka’s internals in order to run Kafka in production or write applications that use it. However, knowing how Kafka works does provide context when troubleshooting or trying to understand why Kafka behaves the way it does. Since covering every single implementation detail and design decision is beyond the scope of this book, in this chapter we focus on three topics that are especially relevant to Kafka practitioners:

• How Kafka replication works

• How Kafka handles requests from producers and consumers

• How Kafka handles storage such as file format and indexes

Understanding these topics in-depth will be especially useful when tuning Kafka—understanding the mechanisms that the tuning knobs control goes a long way toward using them with precise intent rather than fiddling with them randomly.

Cluster Membership

Kafka uses Apache Zookeeper to maintain the list of brokers that are currently members of a cluster. Every broker has a unique identifier that is either set in the broker configuration file or automatically generated. Every time a broker process starts, it registers itself with its ID in Zookeeper by creating an ephemeral node. Different Kafka components subscribe to the /brokers/ids path in Zookeeper where brokers are registered so that they get notified when brokers are added or removed.

If you try to start another broker with the same ID, you will get an error—the new broker will try to register, ...