Easy Local Setup Kafka, Zookeeper and Spring Boot Integration

INTRODUCTION

Apache Kafka is a distributed message broker platform used to handle data streams in real-time. Kafka enables systems to send and receive data in the form of messages reliably, quickly, and consistently.

Kafka consists of:

1. Broker: Kafka servers that store and distribute data.
2. Topic: A logical unit for storing categorized messages. Data in Kafka is stored within topics.
3. Partition: A topic in Kafka can be divided into several partitions to improve performance.
4. Offset: Each message in a partition is assigned a sequence number called an offset. Consumers use offsets to track the messages they have read.

Producer is an application responsible for generating and sending messages to Kafka. The producer writes messages to a specific topic in Kafka.

Consumer is an application responsible for reading and processing messages from Kafka. The consumer subscribes to one or more Kafka topics and retrieves messages from those topics.