High-level Architecture

This lesson gives a brief overview of Kafka’s architecture.

Kafka common terms

Before digging deep into Kafka's architecture, let's first go through some of its common terms.

Brokers

A Kafka server is also called a broker. Brokers are responsible for reliably storing data provided by the producers and making it available to the consumers.

Records

A record is a message or an event that gets stored in Kafka. Essentially, it is the data that travels from producer to consumer through Kafka. A record contains a key, a value, a timestamp, and optional metadata headers.