Michael Noll has started a four-part series. Part one serves as a primer:
In my daily work as a member of Confluent’s Office of the CTO and as the former product manager for ksqlDB and Kafka Streams, I interact with many users of Apache Kafka—be it developers, operators, or architects. Some have a stream processing or Kafka background, some have their roots in relational databases like Oracle and MySQL, and some have neither. But many of them have the same set of technical questions, such as: What’s the difference between an event stream and a database table? Is a Kafka topic the same as a stream? How can I best leverage all these pieces when I want to put my data in Kafka to use?
By the end of this series, you will have answers to each of these common questions and many more. If you are interested to learn about Kafka, I invite you to join me on this journey through Kafka’s core fundamentals!
Part 2 looks at storage fundamentals:
Part 1 of this series discussed the basic elements of an event streaming platform: events, streams, and tables. We also introduced the stream-table duality and learned why it is a crucial concept for an event streaming platform like Apache Kafka®. Here in part 2, we will take a deep dive into Kafka’s storage fundamentals. Notably, we will explore topics and—in my opinion, the most important concept in Kafka: partitions.
We’ll start with the most basic storage question: how do I store data in Kafka?
I’m looking forward to parts 3 and 4.