Describe the role of a partition leader in Kafka?

Every partition has exactly one broker acting as its leader at any given time, and that leader is the sole point of contact for all reads and writes to that partition — producers send records to the leader, and consumers fetch from the leader (unless configured to fetch from a nearby follower for latency reasons in newer Kafka versions).

The leader's other job is coordinating replication: follower brokers hosting replicas of the same partition continuously send fetch requests to the leader to copy new records, and the leader tracks which followers are caught up enough to count as in-sync. If the leader's broker fails, the KRaft controller quorum detects this and triggers a new leader election among the remaining in-sync replicas, so the partition can keep serving traffic without any single broker being a permanent single point of failure for that partition specifically.

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