Kafka Glossary

Browse 9 kafka terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

9 Kafka Terms

Avro
A row-based binary serialization format with schema evolution support. The schema is stored with the data (or in a schema registry), enabling readers to handle...
Consumer Group
A set of consumers that cooperatively consume a Kafka topic, with each partition assigned to exactly one consumer in the group. Adding consumers (up to the...
Kafka Consumer
A client application that reads records from one or more Kafka topics, typically as part of a consumer group that divides partitions among members. Consumers...
Kafka Partition
A Kafka topic is split into ordered, immutable partitions that enable parallel consumption. Messages with the same key always go to the same partition...
Kafka Producer
A client application that publishes records to Kafka topics, optionally choosing keys to control partitioning and ordering. Producers can batch messages,...
Kafka Stream
A continuous flow of event records in Kafka, usually represented by a topic or by a logical processing pipeline built from topics. In engineering discussions...
Kafka Topic
The named log structure in Kafka to which records are written and from which consumers read. A topic is divided into partitions for scalability and ordered...
Producer
In a message queue or event-driven system, the component that creates and publishes messages or events to a broker, topic, or buffer for downstream consumers...
Schema Registry
A centralized service for managing and enforcing schemas for Kafka messages (Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema). Producers register schemas before sending messages;...

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