1. Cluster Size (N): Number of nodes/brokers in the Kafka cluster, we should have 2x+1, i.e. at least 3 nodes or more in an odd number.
2. Partitions: We write/publish data/event into a topic which is divided into partitions (by default 1), but we should have M times N, where M can be any integer number, i.e. M >= 1, to achieve more parallelism and partitioning of data over the cluster.
3.Replication Factor: determines the number of copies (including the original/Leader) of each partition in the cluster. All replicas of a partition exist on separate node/broker, and we should never have R.F. > N, but at least 3.
We recommend having 3 RF with 3 or 5 nodes cluster. This helps in having both availabilities as well as consistency.
Click through for several more tradeoff points.