I start a new series on Apache Kafka:
The broker serves several purposes:
- Know who the producers are and who the consumers are. This way, the producers don’t care who exactly consumes a message and aren’t responsible for the message after they hand it off.
- Buffer for performance. If the consumers are a little slow at the moment but don’t usually get overwhelmed, that’s okay—messages can sit with the broker until the consumer is ready to fetch.
- Let us scale out more easily. Need to add more producers? That’s fine—tell the broker who they are. Need to add consumers? Same thing.
- What about when a consumer goes down? That’s the same as problem #2: hold their messages until they’re ready again.
So brokers add a bit of complexity, but they solve some important problems. The nice part about a broker is that it doesn’t need to know anything about the messages, only who is supposed to receive it.
This is an introduction to the product and part one of an eight-part series.