High-level Architecture

This lesson gives a brief overview of Kafka's architecture.

Kafka common terms

Before we dig into Kafka's architecture, let's go through some common terms.

Brokers

A Kafka server is also called a broker. Brokers store the data producers send, reliably, and make it available to consumers.

Records

A record is a message or event stored in Kafka: the data that travels from producer to consumer through the system. Each record holds a key, a value, a timestamp, and optional metadata headers.

Topics

Kafka divides its messages into categories called topics