What is a Kafka topic?

A topic is the named category a stream of records is published to and read from — think of it as a durable, append-only log that producers write to and consumers read from, identified by a string name like orders or payments.

Unlike a queue, a topic doesn't remove a message once it's read; records stay available for every consumer, subject to the topic's configured retention period, so multiple independent consumer groups can each read the same topic from their own position without interfering with one another.

kafka-topics.sh --create --topic orders --partitions 3 --replication-factor 2 --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

Every topic is split into one or more partitions, which is what actually allows a topic to scale beyond what a single broker or a single consumer could handle on its own.

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