Kafka: The Definitive Guide

Preface

The greatest compliment you can give an author of a technical book is “This is the book I wish I had when I got started with this subject.” This is the goal we set for ourselves when we started writing this book. We looked back at our experience writing Kafka, running Kafka in production, and helping many companies use Kafka to build software architectures and manage their data pipelines and we asked ourselves, “What are the most useful things we can share with new users to take them from beginner to experts?” This book is a reflection of the work we do every day: run Apache Kafka and help others use it in the best ways.

We included what we believe you need to know in order to successfully run Apache Kafka in production and build robust and performant applications on top of it. We highlighted the popular use cases: message bus for event-driven microservices, stream-processing applications, and large-scale data pipelines. We also focused on making the book general and comprehensive enough so it will be useful to anyone using Kafka, no matter the use case or architecture. We cover practical matters such as how to install and configure Kafka and how to use the Kafka APIs, and we also dedicated space to Kafka’s design principles and reliability guarantees, and explore several of Kafka’s delightful architecture details: the replication protocol, controller, and storage layer. We believe that knowledge of Kafka’s design and internals is not only a fun read for those interested ...