Kafka architecture consists of several key components:

• Producer: Applications that publish (write) events to Kafka topics
• Consumer: Applications that subscribe to (read) events from topics
• Broker: Kafka servers that store data and serve client requests
• Topic: Categories or feed names to which records are published
• Partition: Sub-divisions of topics for parallelism and scalability
• Zookeeper: Coordinates and manages Kafka cluster metadata (being replaced by KRaft)