What Is Kafka Data Structure?
Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that allows you to publish and subscribe to streams of records in a fault-tolerant way. It is known for its scalability, high throughput, and low latency.
To understand how Kafka manages data, it’s important to explore its underlying data structure.
Kafka Topics
At the core of Kafka’s data structure are topics. A topic is a category or feed name to which records are published.
It represents a stream of messages belonging to a particular category. Topics in Kafka are similar to tables in databases or collections in NoSQL.
Partitions
Within each topic, the data is further divided into partitions. Partitions allow for parallelism and scalability within Kafka.
Each partition is an ordered, immutable sequence of records that can be read and written independently from other partitions.
When you publish a record to a topic, Kafka assigns the record to one of the available partitions using a configurable mechanism called partitioning strategy. The partitioning strategy determines how records are distributed across partitions based on certain criteria like key, round-robin, or custom logic.
Offsets
Each record within a partition is identified by an offset, which is simply a unique identifier assigned to the record as it enters the partition. Offsets provide ordering guarantees within a partition and allow consumers to track their progress in reading from each partition.
Kafka Brokers
Kafka’s data structure also involves brokers. A broker is an instance of Kafka running on a server that stores and manages the partitions for one or more topics.
Each broker can handle multiple partitions across different topics efficiently.
Replication
To ensure fault tolerance and durability, Kafka allows for the replication of partitions across multiple brokers. Replication involves maintaining multiple copies of each partition on different brokers.
These replicas serve as backups and can take over if a broker fails.
Kafka uses a leader-follower model for replication. One broker acts as the leader for a partition, handling all read and write requests for that partition.
The other replicas act as followers, staying in sync with the leader by replicating its data.
Conclusion
In summary, Kafka’s data structure revolves around topics, partitions, offsets, and brokers. Understanding these fundamental elements is crucial to effectively utilize Kafka’s capabilities for building scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications.