The Hadoop in Real World team shows how you can send large messages in Apache Kafka:
By default the messages you can send and manage in Kafka should be less than 1 MB. To increase this limit there are few properties you need to change in both brokers and consumers.
Let’s say your messages can be up to 10 MB. So in this case your Kafka producers are producing messages up to 10 MB. So your Kafka Brokers and consumers should be able to store and receive messages up to 10 MB respectively.
Kafka Producer sends messages up to 10 MB ==> Kafka Broker allows, stores and manages messages up to 10 MB ==> Kafka Consumer receives messages up to 10 MB
Click through to see how, but also recognize that it’s usually a really bad idea to push large messages in a broker system. Even 1MB is probably going too far—I’d try to stay under 1KB if possible.