What does Kafka’s architecture look like?

Kafka is a distributed streaming platform, consisting mainly of the following components in its architecture.

1. Producer: The one responsible for publishing messages to a Topic in the Kafka cluster.
2. Consumers are responsible for consuming messages from the topic in the Kafka cluster.
3. Brokers are agents within a Kafka cluster, responsible for storing messages and handling requests from producers and consumers.
4. Zookeeper is utilized by Kafka to handle the metadata information of Brokers and Topics within the cluster.
5. Messages are published to a Topic within the Kafka cluster, and each Topic can have multiple partitions.
6. Partitioning allows each Topic to be divided into multiple partitions, with each partition stored on different Brokers in the cluster, enabling distributed storage of messages and load balancing.
7. Replication: duplication. Kafka ensures message reliability and fault tolerance through a replication mechanism, where messages from each partition are replicated across multiple Brokers.

In general, Kafka’s architecture is a distributed, highly reliable messaging system that supports horizontal scalability and high throughput message processing.