Kafka's architecture has producers that write events, brokers that store them and consumers that read them, while controllers manage the cluster's metadata. Kafka also calls an event a record.
Producers are applications that publish, or write, events and choose each event's partition.
Consumers are applications that subscribe to topics and read events in order within each partition.
Brokers are the Kafka servers that store events on disk and serve client requests.
Topics are named feeds, such as payments, that producers publish to.
Partitions split each topic into ordered logs across brokers, for parallelism and scalability.
Controllers keep the metadata, such as which topics exist and where each partition lives.
Older clusters kept this metadata in ZooKeeper, a separate coordination service. Since Kafka 4.0, clusters run only in KRaft mode. The controllers agree on each change through Raft, a protocol in which a majority must accept it.
Rewriting in plainer words…
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